[new blog post] Academic chat: On PhD muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/academ…

Academic Chat with Murat and Aleksey: 5 Cs of the Invisible Curriculum. I and Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) talk about PhD, academia and skills, traits and qualities for success in research. charap.co/academic-chat-… youtu.be/u9dQDHArA-I

Staying up to date with database / distributed systems research, unordered: - CMU database seminar - Aleksey Charapko paper reading group - Software Internals discord - DatabaseDevelopment subreddit - Database Internals discord (databass . dev) - PVLDB twitter - Murat Demirbas

Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: "Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research" Here we discuss this fun paper and add a bit of our skepticism on AI upending research and what it means for community. youtu.be/bE9Ysn9hKUU

My TLDL is here: charap.co/murat-and-alek… I like that ADRS will force thinking about "evaluators" a lot more, which means thinking about specs, constraints, expectations, etc. But it is also the hard part of research. Mistakes will guide LLMs to create brittle solutions

Very fun to listen to Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) and Aleksey Charapko's real time thoughts and reaction while reading our paper 😃

"Lambda is experiencing function invocation errors because an internal subsystem was impacted by the network load balancer health checks." Oh AWS... slow/inefficient error or exception handling creates some interesting metastable failures.

"We are also experiencing significant improvements to Lambda invocation errors" Oh AWS... we are you improving errors? you should fix them!

"We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests" Oh AWS... was this a wise recommendation?

Some systems keep growing not because they were perfect, but because they kept listening to the developers. In our QConSF Keynote, Andrew Davidson and I will reflect on how open collaboration and curiosity can turn frustration into progress and how trust, built incrementally,

After a while, Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) and I read another nice paper together: "Mitigating Application Resource Overload with Targeted Task Cancellation" from the recent SOSP. It looks at killing "blocker" tasks that hog resources to improve performance. youtu.be/mCmcQgwho7U

PaPoC workshop is back! Submission deadline is on January 23rd: papoc-workshop.github.io/2026/cfp.html

We introduce LeaseGuard: a Raft-specific lease protocol with a precise spec and fast recovery after crashes. By leveraging Leader Completeness, the log itself becomes the lease, avoiding the need to maintain extra protocol vars/messages. Using log knowledge, LeaseGuard

On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems. Here are some thoughts on metastable failure feedback loops and trying to avoid them charap.co/on-metastable-…

[new blog post] Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/rethin…

[new blog post] Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions about Transaction Workloads? muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/are-da…

The “Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass” paper was the first one that Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) and I read together in 2026. It was a short but interesting read that discusses 10 years of hardware evolution at AWS charap.co/murat-and-alek… youtu.be/9Lw4GbKbmyw

When the Cure Is Worse than the Disease: Metastability in Recovery... more in March at USENIX Association SREcon usenix.org/conference/sre…

The first of two SoCC submission deadlines is coming up soon! First abstract deadline: February 6, 2026 First submission deadline: February 13, 2026 Submission site: socc26.hotcrp.com Call for papers: acmsocc.org/2026/papers.ht…