A paper on why io_uring workloads are so hard to see into, and what it takes to fix that. Because submission and completion happen in rings shared with the kernel, strace catches only the setup call, and the tracepoints that expose the actual request flow are not stable ABI, so the tools built on them work on narrow kernel ranges and break elsewhere. uringscope is a single binary eBPF tool that reconstructs per request lifecycles anyway, leaning on BTF probed program variants, field flavors, and position independent reads to survive struct layout drift across kernels. The evaluation is the part worth sitting with: aggregate mode costs 0.7 to 9.9% of throughput on device bound NVMe, cheaper than any full fidelity alternative measured, and the same reconstruction feeds a correctness mode that flags submission boundary hazards and reports named pathologies with the evidence behind them, aimed at someone in the middle of a latency incident rather than browsing histograms.
A paper from the AWS team describing the design of Aurora DSQL, a distributed SQL database that aims to scale OLTP workloads across regions without giving up strong consistency. It explains how the system decouples the transaction path from storage, uses quorum based replication and a coordination layer to preserve ACID semantics globally, and keeps latency reasonable by letting regions operate with local autonomy while still agreeing on a consistent order. The evaluation is the interesting part, with measurements across different transaction types and region configurations that show where the tradeoffs actually land rather than just asserting they work.
A retrospective USENIX ATC paper on how DynamoDB evolved from the original Dynamo design into a fully managed service. It's a rare, candid look at the operational lessons behind a system running at enormous scale: predictable performance, admission control, durability, and the trade-offs made to keep tail latencies flat. Good reading if you care about how distributed storage behaves in production rather than on paper.