IDEA: An Infrastructure for Detection-based Adaptive Consistency Control in Replicated Services

In Internet-scale distributed systems, replication-based scheme has been widely deployed to increase the availability and efficiency of services. Hence, consistency maintenance among replicas becomes an important research issue because poor consistency results in poor QoS or even monetary loss. Recent research in this area focuses on enforcing a certain consistency level, instead of perfect consistency, to strike a balance between consistency guarantee and system’s scalability. In this paper, we argue that, besides balancing consistency and scalability, it is equally, if not more, important to achieve adaptability of consistency maintenance. I.e., the system adjusts its consistency level on the fly to suit applications’ ongoing need. This paper then presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of IDEA (an Infrastructure for DEtection-based Adaptive consistency control), which adaptively controls consistency in replicated services by utilizing an inconsistency detection framework that detects inconsistency among nodes in a timely manner. Besides, IDEA achieves high performance of inconsistency resolution in terms of resolution delay. Through two emulated distribution application on Planet-Lab, IDEA is evaluated from two aspects: its adaptive interface and its performance of inconsistency resolution. According the experimentation, IDEA achieves adaptability by adjusting the consistency level according to users’ preference on-demand. As for performance, IDEA achieves low inconsistency resolution delay and communication cost

Trade-offs in Replicated Systems

Replicated systems provide the foundation for most of today’s large-scale services. Engineering such replicated system is an onerous task. The first—and often foremost—step in this task is to establish an appropriate set of design goals, such as availability or performance, which should synthesize all the underlying system properties. Mixing design goals, however, is fraught with dangers, given that many properties are antagonistic and fundamental trade-offs exist among them. Navigating the harsh landscape of trade-offs is difficult because these formulations use different notations and system models, so it is hard to get an all-encompassing understanding of the state of the art in this area. In this paper, we address this difficulty by providing a systematic overview of the most relevant trade- offs involved in building replicated systems. Starting from the well-known FLP result, we follow a long line of research and investigate different trade-offs, assembling a coherent perspective of these results. Among others, we consider trade-offs which examine the complex interactions between properties such as consistency, availability, low latency, partition-tolerance, churn, scalability, and visibility latency

FUSE: Lightweight Guaranteed Distributed Failure Notification

FUSE is a lightweight failure notification service for building distributed systems. Distributed systems built with FUSE are guaranteed that failure notifications never fail. Whenever a failure notification is triggered, all live members of the FUSE group will hear a notification within a bounded period of time, irrespective of node or communication failures. In contrast to previous work on failure detection, the responsibility for deciding that afailure has occurred is shared between the FUSE service and the distributed application. This allows applications to implement their own definitions of failure. Our experience building a scalable distributed event delivery system on an overlay network has convinced us of the usefulness of this service. Our results demonstrate that the network costs of each FUSE group can be small; in particular, our overlay network implementation requires no additional liveness-verifying ping traffic beyond that already needed to maintain the overlay, making the steady state network load independent of the number of active FUSE groups

Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration

this article presents Om, the first read/write peer-to-peer, wide-area storage system that achieves high availability and manageability through online automatic regeneration while still preserving consistency guarantees. We achieve these properties through the following techniques. First, by utilizing the limited view divergence property in today's Internet and by adopting the witness model,Omisable to regenerate from any single replica, rather than requiring a majority quorum, at the cost of a small (10 -6 in our experiments) probability of violating consistency during each regeneration. As a result, Om can deliver high availability with a small number of replicas, while traditional designs would significantly increase the number of replicas. Next, we distinguish failure-free reconfigurations from failure-induced ones, enabling common reconfigurations to proceed with a single round of communication. Finally, we use a lease graph among the replicas and a two-phase write protocol to optimize for reads, so that reads in Om can be processed by any single replica. Experiments on PlanetLab show that consistent regeneration in Om completes in approximately 20 seconds

Abstract Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration

Reducing management costs and improving the availability of large-scale distributed systems require automatic replica regeneration, i.e., creating new replicas in response to replica failures. A major challenge to regeneration is maintaining consistency when the replica group changes. Doing so is particularly difficult across the wide area where failure detection is complicated by network congestion and node overload. In this context, this paper presents Om, the first read/write peer-to-peer wide-area storage system that achieves high availability and manageability through online automatic regeneration while still preserving consistency guarantees. We achieve these properties through the following techniques. First, by utilizing the limited view divergence property in today’s Internet and by adopting the witness model, Om is able to regenerate from any single replica rather than requiring a majority quorum, at the cost of a small (10 −6 in our experiments) probability of violating consistency. As a result, Om can deliver high availability with a small number of replicas, while traditional designs would significantly increase the number of replicas. Next, we distinguish failure-free reconfigurations from failureinduced ones, enabling common reconfigurations to proceed with a single round of communication. Finally, we use a lease graph among the replicas and a two-phase write protocol to optimize for reads, and reads in Om can be processed by any single replica. Experiments on PlanetLab show that consistent regeneration in Om completes in approximately 20 seconds.