Reflections on the History of Operating Systems Research in Fault Tolerance

In October of 2015, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of SOSP as part of SOSP 25. Peter Denning formed a “history day” steering committee, and invited me to give a short talk on the topic of fault tolerance (and also asked if I could help organize the remainder of the day). This essay is intended as an accompaniment to the video and slides of my talk. My topic here is dominated by two fairly specific questions, central to the way we think about the discipline: Must strong properties bring complexity, poor scalability, high latencies and other significant costs? Can a system support consistency without dictating to its users? The debate surrounding these issues has animated the community at least since the mid 1980’s. Any decision to focus dictates a degree of narrowness. For example, Butler Lampson has argued that one cannot have security without reliability, and vice versa [25], and the SOSP 2015 program supports his view. Nonetheless, I won’t be discussing security here. I hope that nobody is offended by my omission of this and other important work; just like the other history day speakers, I was required to keep the scope of my talk manageable and focused, and omissions were unavoidable.