Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet practical designs. This design process can be characterized as “fighting complexity with abstraction”: in any complex environment, how do you corral that complexity into cleanly de...
