Remote, in-memory key-value (RINK) stores such as Memcached [6] and Redis [7] are widely used in industry and are an active area of academic research. Coupled with stateless application servers to execute business logic and a databaselike system to provide persistent storage, they form a core component of popular data center service architectures. We argue that the time of the RINK store has come and gone: their domain-independent APIs (e.g., PUT/GET) push complexity back to the application, leading to extra (un)marshalling overheads and network hops. Instead, data center services should be built using stateful application servers or custom in-memory stores with domain-specific APIs, which offer higher performance than RINKS at lower cost. Such designs have been avoided because they are challenging to implement without appropriate infrastructure support. Given recent advances in auto-sharding [8, 9], we argue it is time to revisit these decisions. In this paper, we evaluate the potential performance improvements of stateful designs, propose a new abstraction, the linked, in-memory key-value (LINK) store, to enable developers to easily implement stateful services, and discuss areas for future research.

Ensuring the freshness of client data is a fundamental problem for applications that rely on cloud infrastructure to store data and mediate sharing. Thialfi is a notification service developed at Google to simplify this task. Thialfi supports applications written in multiple programming languages and running on multiple platforms, e.g., browsers, phones, and desktops. Applications register their interest in a set of shared objects and receive notifications when those objects change. Thialfi servers run in multiple Google data centers for availability and replicate their state asynchronously. Thialfi's approach to recovery emphasizes simplicity: all server state is soft, and clients drive recovery and assist in replication. A principal goal of our design is to provide a straightforward API and good semantics despite a variety of failures, including server crashes, communication failures, storage unavailability, and data center failures.