Beaver: Practical Partial Snapshots for Distributed Cloud Services

Explore a groundbreaking approach to distributed snapshots in cloud services through this 15-minute conference talk from OSDI '24. Dive into Beaver, the first practical partial snapshot protocol ensuring causal consistency under external traffic interference. Learn how this innovative system leverages software load balancers and data center communication patterns to minimize operational changes and eliminate blocking, resulting in near-zero overhead for user traffic. Discover the protocol's effectiveness through extensive testbed experiments and novel use cases, bridging the gap between classic snapshot protocols and the realities of modern cloud environments.