Bugs have always been a big threat to the reliability and efficiency of software systems. In the era of big data and cloud computing, they continue to take effect, but often with new forms.

This talk will first discuss our recent study of Microsoft Azure incidents, understanding what led to production cloud service incidents. It will then go into details about two types of interesting bugs, (1) memory and persistent data races in the cloud and (2) inefficiencies in Object-Relational Mapping systems. Good understanding of these bugs has led to our tools discovering more than 1000 bugs in latest versions of popular open-source applications.

Shan Lu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2008. She was the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 2009 to 2014. Her research focuses on software reliability and efficiency, particularly detecting, diagnosing, and fixing functional and performance bugs in large software systems.

Shan won Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2014, Distinguished Alumni Educator Award from Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois in 2013, and NSF Career Award in 2010. Her co-authored papers won Google Scholar Classic Paper 2017, Best Paper Awards at USENIX OSDI 2016 and USENIX FAST 2013, ACM-SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ICSE 2019, ICSE 2015, and FSE 2014, an ACM-SIGPLAN Research Highlight Award at PLDI 2011, and an IEEE Micro Top Picks in ASPLOS 2006.

Shan currently serves as the Vice Chair of ACM-SIGOPS (2015–) and the Associate Editor for IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. She also serves as the technical program co-chair for USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) in 2020, USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) in 2015, and ACM Asia-Pacific Systems Workshop (APSys) in 2018.