2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '16)

We present Ovid, a framework for building evolvable large-scale distributed systems that run in the cloud. Ovid constructs and deploys distributed systems as a collection of simple components, creating systems suited for containerization in the cloud. Ovid supports evolution of systems through transformations, which are automated refinements. Examples of transformations include replication, batching, sharding, and encryption. Ovid transformations guarantee that an evolving system still implements the same specification. Moreover, systems built with transformations can be combined with other systems to implement more complex infrastructure services. The result of this framework is a software-defined distributed system, in which a logically centralized controller specifies the components, their interactions, and their transformations.