Blog by Murat Demirbas
On distributed systems broadly defined and other curiosities. The opinions on this site are my own.
13 posts in the last 90 days · newest 23 Sept
General methods that scale with computation will inevitably displace hand-engineered domain knowledge! Sutton’s Bitter Lesson hangs like a Sword of Damocles over all of us. This paper, which just dropped, applies that lesson to data agents, and says that as LLMs improve, they…
My quest for a principled solution for metastable failures has taken me back to my roots on self-stabilization, as this recent paper related the problem to composition of self-stabilizing systems. But, my literature search for recent work on composing self-stabilizing systems…
AI doomerism is everywhere these days. Every field, and recently humanity as a whole, has had its "we're finished" post. In contrast to the run-of-the-mill hot take, Jason Potts has written an economics paper on why academia is doomed. So let's dive in. What does a university…
Aleksey and I are back to reading papers live. This paper, Jetpack(OSDI '26), attempts building a universal 1-RTT fast-path framework that bolts onto existing leader-based consensus protocols with minimal modification. Why would we want this? Classic consensus protocols like…
Last week I wrote about modular verification of systems through open TLA+ specs and rely-guarantee discharge. In this post, I apply the same approach to study the metastability mechanics of a retry storm. Through this modeling I show that when the system is metastable, it is due…
Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the cognitive debt of agent-generated code. With every new model release, the gap is widening and humans are becoming more of a bottleneck in the…
Preamble. This post came slowly, simmering over months really. So there is some stream of consciousness in here, and a lot of deliberating in public. The post is me learning modular verification and talking myself into it at the same time. Even pep-talking myself, because this…
I am a distributed systems researcher. I mostly read and write about distributed systems and lightweight formal methods. But as my blog definition says, the blog is about "distributed systems broadly defined and other curiosities". The last two years, LLMs were unavoidably the…
Specula is an agentic system that automates the process of software bug finding through authoring and model-checking a spec for the code. It derives TLA+ specifications automatically from the code, checks code-spec conformance through trace validation, model checks the spec to…
This week, I presented this paper at ICCCN'26. This is joint work with Aleksey Charapko (University of New Hampshire) and my MongoDB colleagues Matt Broadstone, Daniel Gomez Ferro, and Akshat Vig. The paper investigates how to build a metastability tolerant execution control…
The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped. Reading it yesterday was an interesting experience, because I spent two years (2022-23) working with the AWS team that designed and built Aurora DSQL. Since I have been very familiar with the architecture, the paper's overview description…
Metastability has been studied in previous work as a self-sustaining degradation in goodput that persists even after the trigger is gone. The degraded state loiters on entirely due to the system's own internal feedback loops (retries, queues), and there is no simple reset button…
Moving is not for the faint of heart! The surgeon general should issue a warning against moving houses after age 50. Coordinating our cross-country move was one of the hardest thing I had done. Selling our house in Buffalo, finding a suitable rental house in the Bay Area…
Looking at my peak male physique, and my Keanu Reeves baby face, you would never suspect it, but I recently turned 50. As is the tradition, I thought about writing a post titled "50 Lessons at 50". Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of wisdom. The thing is, I still feel like…
In 1957, Parkinson postulated his "Law of Triviality" using a fictitious committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. The reactor design gets 10 minutes because nobody understands it, so nobody argues. The bike shed gets 45 minutes because everyone has opinions about the…
We spent 10 days in Italy in early April. It was a lot of fun. Back when I was a grad student, I stayed in Pisa for a month for a "summer school on mobile computing" in 2003. Mobile computing was the next "big" thing back then. (In retrospect, the research was misguided about…
Shortly after I joined MongoDB research, we ran a TLA+ workshop. It was a two-day ordeal. We had a 1.5 days of instruction on TLA+ and syntax, after which we tried to help people get started with modeling. People liked learning about TLA+ on the first day, but except for a…
The transformative power of LLMs in coding has been irrefutable, and it feels like we are living through a magical computing renaissance. On the socials, we hear impressive numbers of lines of code generated, features delivered, and bugs fixed. But, the macroeconomic indicators…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to San Jose at the end of May for the ACM CAIS conference. On Day 0, I gave a very short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO) workshop. This post is the promised summary of our paper, "A Case for Simulation-Driven…
Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference. On Day 0, I gave a short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO) workshop. And yes, I promise to write a summary of our paper, "A Case for Simulation-Driven Resilience in Agent-First Data Systems" soon!…