The low price and convenience of the cloud and the rapid advancement of hardware technologies are drawing enterprises and individuals to run and utilize various services in the cloud. However, many layers of the software stack in the cloud are designed before the cloud era, and inefficiencies exist for designing, deploying, and running the services. Especially, problems surrounding high concurrency, resource sharing, and redundant implementations of core system functionalities are prevalent in the cloud, and there is a need for a redesign of the software stack.

In this talk, I will present three systems that involve new abstractions and layers in the software stack of the cloud to address these issues. First, I will describe how supporting ACID transactions from the block layer can facilitate storage system designs in the cloud. Second, I will present a simple abstraction to adopt distributed consistency semantics within a server to utilize shared storage resources better and to achieve lower access latencies. Finally, I will briefly talk about a new write-once address space design that serves as the base layer, which provides availability, consistency, durability, and fault tolerance, for many distributed systems in the cloud.

Ji-Yong Shin is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University working with Prof. Mahesh Balakrishnan and Prof. Zhong Shao. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Cornell University under the supervision of Prof. Hakim Weatherspoon. His research focuses on designing and implementing novel storage systems, distributed systems, and networking systems. His recent work includes storage systems that achieve isolation in the cloud and a new Paxos-based software abstraction that facilitates distributed system designs. Ji-Yong was an intern at Google, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research, and is serving as a program committee member of USENIX ATC and ACM SoCC this year.