Abstract
This paper studies how today's cloud storage services support collaborative file editing. As a tradeoff for transparency/userfriendliness, they do not ask collaborators to use version control systems but instead implement their own heuristics for handling conflicts, which however often lead to unexpected and undesired experiences. With measurements and reverse engineering, we unravel a number of their design and implementation issues as the root causes of poor experiences. Driven by the findings, we propose to reconsider the collaboration support of cloud storage services from a novel perspective of operations without using any locks. To enable this idea, we design intelligent approaches to the inference and transformation of users' editing operations, as well as optimizations to the maintenance of files' historic versions. We build an open-source system UFC2 (User-Friendly Collaborative Cloud) to embody our design, which can avoid most (98%) conflicts with little (2%) overhead.
| Original language | English (US) |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2020 |
| Publisher | USENIX Association |
| Pages | 13-27 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781939133120 |
| State | Published - 2020 |
| Event | 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2020 - Santa Clara, United States Duration: Feb 25 2020 → Feb 27 2020 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2020 |
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Conference
| Conference | 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2020 |
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| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Santa Clara |
| Period | 2/25/20 → 2/27/20 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under grant 2018YFB1004700, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 61822205, 61632020 and 61632013, and the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist).
Funding Information:
We thank our shepherd, Geoff Kuenning, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions. Also, we thank Liangyi Gong for his help in typesetting, and Feng-min Zhu for his generous discussion. This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under grant 2018YFB1004700, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 61822205, 61632020 and 61632013, and the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © Proc. of the 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Tech., FAST 2020. All rights reserved.