PhD Thesis (Modern)

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\chapter{Introduction}
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\noindent{\small\color{accent}\bfseries Predictable Recovery in Geo-Replicated Storage Systems}\\
{\footnotesize\itshape A doctoral thesis by Elena Marchetti \, \textbullet\, Aldermere University}

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\section{Motivation}
On an ordinary afternoon in 2024, a routing change at a large cloud provider
split a storage cluster into two groups that could each reach clients but not
each other. No machine crashed and no disk failed, yet writes stalled for
nineteen minutes. Incidents of this shape, where connectivity is asymmetric
rather than absent, account for the longest outages in the public postmortem
record, and they are almost entirely invisible to the tools we use to test
distributed systems.

\section{Thesis statement}
This thesis argues that recovery time under partial network partitions is a
predictable, boundable property of a replication protocol, and that worst-case
partitions can be synthesized mechanically from the protocol specification and
used as first-class test inputs.

\section{Contributions}
The dissertation makes three contributions: a formal model of recovery latency
for asymmetric faults, proved bounds for leader-based and leaderless consensus,
and \textsc{Fissure}, an open-source fault-synthesis framework evaluated on a
40-node testbed against etcd, TiKV, and a research prototype.

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