Koala paper accepted at NSDI'27

Our paper “Koala: Non-disruptive Reconfiguration for Long-running Stateful Dataflows” was just accepted at USENIX NSDI’27. Congratulations to my PhD student Lei Huang for leading the effort and co-authors Sakshi Sharma, Chenxu Yu, Zikun Wang, Yuanli Wang, Zichen Zhu, and John Liagouris.

Koala is a novel reconfiguration protocol for distributed dataflow systems that retains the operational performance of embedded-state architectures while matching the disruption-free adaptability of external-state designs. Unlike prior protocols which relocate all state regardless of whether it will soon be accessed, Koala migrates state in a fine-grained, lazy manner. To achieve that, it employs a lightweight ownership transfer mechanism that safely decouples event routing from state location.