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From YouTube: CRDTs in Practice - Marc Shapiro & Nuno Preguiça

Description

Slides and more info: http://www.codemesh.io/codemesh2015/marc-shapiro
The CRDT abstraction (Conflct-free Replicated Data Type) is a useful tool for building highly scalable and available applications. CRDTs combine three key intuitions: (i) Encapsulate distribution inside the boundaries of a data type, so that ordinary programmers can build applications by combining CRDTs from a library; (ii) support "write now, propagate later" concurrent updates to ensure scalability, availability and performance; (iii) some simple of mathematical properties that ensure that data replicas converge safely. This talk presents the principles and design of some useful CRDTs. We discuss the CRDT approach in the context of some real applications of our industrial partners. We present some of the difficulties and limitations of CRDTs, in the more general perspective of consistency and scalability. We present recent extensions that address some of these limitations, in particular formaintaining application invariants.

Marc Shapiro does his research on distributed computer systems, data replication and consistency algorithms, and distributed garbage collection. He invented the proxy concept, which is now universal on the Internet. He published at SOSP and OSDI, the two most prestigious venues of the area (one of the only two French papers at both venues). He was instrumental in the creation of EuroSys, the main European venue in the area. He authored 64 international publications, 17 recognised software systems, and four patents. Dr Shapiro's research started with a PhD from Université Paul Sabatier for research performed at atLAAS in Toulouse, France (1980), followed by a post-doc at MIT, and a researcher position at CMIRH. He is a researcher at INRIA since 1984. He spent a one-year sabbatical at Cornell (1993—1994), and he led the Cambridge Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK) from 1999 to 2005. He is currently a Senior Researcher for INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, in the Regal group, located at LIP6.

Nuno Preguiça is curently Associate Professor at FCT - Univ. NOVA de Lisboa and leads the Computer Systems group at NOVA LINCS. He does research in the area of distributed systems, mobile computing and data management. He co-proposed the concept of CRDTs and a number of extensions to CRDTs, including variants for enforcing global invariants and for efficient execution of distributed computations.