Eric Brewer
Leads work on giant-scale systems, including early cloud computing, scalable clusters, and the CAP theorem.
Authored Publications
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Spanner, TrueTime and the CAP Theorem
Google (2017)
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Spanner is Google's highly available global-scale distributed database. It provides strong consistency for all transactions. This combination of availability and consistency over the wide area is generally considered impossible due to the CAP Theorem. We show how Spanner achieves this combination and why it is consistent with CAP. We also explore the role that TrueTime, Google's globally synchronized clock, plays in consistency for reads and especially for snapshots that enable consistent and repeatable analytics.
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Lessons learned from three container management systems over a decade.
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Disks form the central element of Cloud-based storage, whose demand far outpaces the considerable rate of innovation in disks. Exponential growth in demand, already in progress for 15+ years, implies that most future disks will be in data centers and thus part of a large collection of disks. We describe the “collection view” of disks and how it and the focus on tail latency, driven by live services, place new and different requirements on disks. Beyond defining key metrics for data-center disks, we explore a range of new physical design options and changes to firmware that could improve these metrics.
We hope this is the beginning of a new era of “data center” disks and a new broad and open discussion about how to evolve disks for data centers. The ideas presented here provide some guidance and some options, but we believe the best solutions will come from the combined efforts of industry, academia and other large customers.
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The Claremont report on database research
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Rakesh Agrawal
Anastasia Ailamaki
Philip A. Bernstein
Michael J. Carey
Surajit Chaudhuri
Anhai Doan
Daniela Florescu
Michael J. Franklin
Hector Garcia-Molina
Johannes Gehrke
Le Gruenwald
Laura M. Haas
Alon Y. Halevy
Joseph M. Hellerstein
Yannis E. Ioannidis
Hank F. Korth
Donald Kossmann
Samuel Madden
Roger Magoulas
Beng Chin Ooi
Tim O'Reilly
Raghu Ramakrishnan
Sunita Sarawagi
Michael Stonebraker
Alexander S. Szalay
Gerhard Weikum
Commun. ACM, 52 (2009), pp. 56-65