The Aurora Single Level Store Operating System

Abstract

Applications on modern operating systems manage their ephemeral state in memory and persistent state on disk. Ensuring consistency between them is a source of significant developer effort and application bugs. We present the Aurora single level store, an OS that eliminates the distinction between ephemeral and persistent application state. Aurora continuously persists entire applications with millisecond granularity to provide persistence as an OS service. Aurora revists the problem of application checkpointing through the lens of a single level store. Aurora supports transparent and customized applications. The RocksDB database using Aurora's APIs achieved a 75% throughput improvement while removing 40% of its code.