Consistency and Reliability in Cloud-backed Storage Systems

June 20, 2014
Alysson Neves Bessani | University of Lisboa Faculty of Sciences

Despite their rising popularity, current cloud storage services and cloud-backed storage systems still have some limitations related to reliability, durability assurances and inefficient file sharing. In this talk I’ll briefly review the state of the art in cloud-backed storage systems (e.g., Dropbox, SkyDrive, S3QL, BlueSky) and proceed to describe SCFS, a shared cloud-backed file system that covers most of the deficiencies in previous systems. Particularly emphasis will be given on SCFS novel techniques: consistency anchors for ensuring strong consistency(-on-close) semantics and cloud-of-clouds replication for implementing fault tolerance despite arbitrary faults on storage service providers.

Speaker Details

Alysson Bessani is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Informatics of the University of Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, Portugal (since 2007), and a member of the LASIGE/Navigators research team (since 2006). He was a visiting professor on ECE-CMU in 2010 and is currently a visiting researcher in MSR Cambridge. His main interests are distributed systems, fault tolerance, storage, middleware and systems architecture. More information about him can be found at http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~bessani.