Abstract

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.

Bio: 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.