LADIS'14: 8th Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware

LADIS is an annual workshop focused on aspects of largescale distributed systems and middleware. Since its inauguration in 2007, the primary goal has been to offer a program with a good balance between presentations from industry and academia. The attendance of the workshop also reflects this balance, with regular participants from top universities and major companies offering Web-scale online services. The topics covered throughout the years have varied widely, covering aspects of distributed systems such as fault tolerance, consistency, security, and performance. Furthermore, they have been presented in the broad context of storage systems, data centers, and online services such as Web search and social networks. Given the focus on fostering discussion between industry and academia, talks at LADIS common showcase ongoing research work and present lessons and experience from industry. This interplay has proven to be a great opportunity for a reality check: does a given research work have any chance of succeeding in practice? LADIS is certainly not an oracle, but sharing experiences during the workshop has helped many researchers to better guide their ongoing research work.