Aram Bajakian's contribution to the COVID-19 Special Issue.

Technical debt utilises financial debt as a metaphor to describe the phenomenon of increasing software development costs over time. Whilst this phenomenon is evidently detrimental to the long-term success of software development, it appears to be poorly understood in the academic literature. The absence of a clear definition and model for technical debt means that the notion of technical debt r...

Consensus is at the core of many production-grade distributed systems. Given the prevalence of these systems, it is important to offer consensus as a cloud service. To match the multi-tenant requirements of the cloud, consensus as a service must provide performance guarantees, and prevent aggressive tenants from disrupting the others. Fulfilling this goal is not trivial without overprovisioning...

Traditional performance alerting works well when servers are dedicated to specific applications since the likely source of the alert is known. However when multiple workloads are hosted on a consolidated server, probable cause analysis for alerts becomes more challenging. An approach is presented for stratifying alerts by both metric and workload so that the distribution of alerts across worklo...