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Knockoff: Cheap Versions in the Cloud
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
Cloud-based storage provides reliability and ease-of-management. Unfortunately, it can also incur significant costs for both storing and communicating data. These costs increase when systems retain past versions of files for data recovery, auditing, and forensic troubleshooting. While techniques such as chunk-based deduplication and delta compression have proven very effective in reducing bytes stored and sent over the network, further optimizations to these techniques are yielding increasingly incremental benefits. We argue that it is time to consider additional strategies for reducing storage costs. In our current work, we are demonstrating that one such strategy, deterministic recomputation of data, can substantially reduce the cost of cloud storage. Our distributed file system, Knockoff, selectively substitutes nondeterministic inputs for file data. Our results show that this reduces the cost of sending files to the cloud without versioning by 21–24%; the relative benefit is substantially greater when past versions are retained.
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