Project Overview

The Hydro project is a framework for data-centric cloud programming research from the RISE Lab at UC Berkeley. Our work thus far has focused on developing low-latency systems that support coordination-free consistency techniques to resolve potentially conflicting updates to shared state. The two systems we have developed thus far are Anna and Cloudburst.

Anna

Anna is a low-latency autoscaling KVS that aims to provide the latency guarantees of a memory-speed KVS like Redis while also autoscaling to match workload, similar to systems like AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage. To avoid expensive locking or lock-free atomic techniques, Anna allows each worker thread to accept updates to the same keys in parallel without coordination. To resolve conflicting updates, Anna stores all data in lattice data structures which have associate, commutative, and idempotent merge functions.

Cloudburst

Cloudburst is a stateful Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform built on top of Anna. Cloudburst focuses on providing best-in-class performance for FaaS workloads that share state (e.g., function composition, direct communication) by introducing caches that live on the same physical machines as function executors. Cloudburst also guarantees causal consistency and repeatable reads for compositions of functions by leveraging Anna's consistency primitives and adding new consistency protocols at the caching layer.

Research Papers

Talks

Blog Posts