Research Ethics

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People rely on Jepsen to help them test their own systems, to make decisions about algorithms, to compare different databases against one another, and to suggest how to work with a particular system’s constraints. To put this work in context, I’d like to talk about Jepsen’s limitations and biases–technical, social, and fiscal. Jepsen analyses generally consist of running operations against a distributed system in a dedicated cluster, introducing faults into that cluster, and observing whether the results of those operations are consistent with some model. This introduces various sources for error: bugs, bounds on the search space, and the problem of induction. Jepsen’s design also limits its use as a performance benchmark. As software, Jepsen and the libraries it uses have bugs. I do my best to avoid them, but there have been bugs in Jepsen before and there will be again. These could lead to false negatives and false positives. I write automated tests and read histories by hand to doub

Research Ethics JEPSEN Research Ethics People rely on Jepsen to help them test their own systems, to make decisions about algorithms, and to understand how to use systems safely. To put this work in context, we’d like to talk about Jepsen’s limitations and biases–technical, social, and fiscal. Technical Limitations Jepsen analyses generally consist of running operations against a distributed system in a dedicated cluster, introducing faults into that cluster, and observing whether the results of those operations are consistent with some model. This introduces various sources for error: bugs, b

Research Ethics

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