The fundamentals of heavy-tails

Heavy-tails are a continual source of excitement and confusion across disciplines as they are repeatedly "discovered" in new contexts. This is especially true within computer systems, where heavy-tails seemingly pop up everywhere -- from degree distributions in the internet and social networks to file sizes and interarrival times of workloads. However, despite nearly a decade of work on heavy-tails they are still treated as mysterious, surprising, and even controversial.