Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS

To appear in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’11) Don’t Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS Wyatt Lloyd?, Michael J. Freedman?, Michael Kaminskyy, and David G. Andersenz ?Princeton University, yIntel Labs, zCarnegie Mellon University ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Geo-replicated, distributed data stores that support complex online Distributed data stores are a fundamental building block of modern applications, such as social networks, must provide an “always- Internet services. Ideally, these data stores would be strongly con- on” experience where operations always complete with low latency. sistent, always available for reads and writes, and able to continue Today’s systems often sacrifice strong consistency to achieve these operating during network partitions. The CAP Theorem, unfor- goals, exposing inconsistencies to their clients and necessitating tunately, proves it impossible to create a system that achieves all complex application logic. In this paper, we identify and define three [13, 23]. Instead, modern web services have chosen over- a consistency model—causal consistency with convergent conflict whelmingly to embrace availability and partition tolerance at the handling, or causal+—that is the strongest achieved under these cost of strong consistency [16, 20, 30]. This is perhaps not surpris- constraints. ing, given that this choice also enables these systems to provide low We present the design and implementation of COPS, a key-value latency for client operations and high scalability. Further, many of store that delivers this consistency model across the wide-area. A the earlier high-scale Internet services, typically focusing on web key contribution of COPS is its scalability, which can enforce causal search, saw little reason for stronger consistency, although this posi- dependencies between keys stored across an entire cluster, rather tion is changing with the rise of interactive services such as social than a single server like previous systems. The central approach in networking applications [46]. We refer to systems with these four COPS is tracking and explicitly checking whether causal dependen- properties—Availability, low Latency, Partition-tolerance, and high cies between keys are satisfied in the local cluster before exposing Scalability—as ALPS systems. writes. Further, in COPS-GT, we introduce get transactions in or- Given that ALPS systems must sacrifice strong consistency (i.e., der to obtain a consistent view of multiple keys without locking or linearizability), we seek the strongest consistency model that is blocking. Our evaluation shows that COPS completes operations achievable under these constraints. Stronger consistency is desirable in less than a millisecond, provides throughput similar to previous because it makes systems easier for a programmer to reason about. In systems when using one server per cluster, and scales well as we this paper, we consider causal consistency with convergent conflict increase the number of servers in each cluster. It also shows that handling, which we refer to as causal+ consistency. Many previous COPS-GT provides similar latency, throughput, and scaling to COPS systems believed to implement the weaker causal consistency [10, for common workloads. 41] actually implement the more useful causal+ consistency, though none do so in a scalable manner. The causal component of causal+ consistency ensures that the Categories and Subject Descriptors data store respects the causal dependencies between operations [31]. Consider a scenario where a user uploads a picture to a web site, C.2.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Distributed Systems the picture is saved, and then a reference to it is added to that user’s album. The reference “depends on” the picture being saved. Under causal+ consistency, these dependencies are always satisfied. General Terms Programmers never have to deal with the situation where they can Design, Experimentation, Performance get the reference to the picture but not the picture itself, unlike in systems with weaker guarantees, such as eventual consistency. The convergent conflict handling component of causal+ consis- Keywords tency ensures that replicas never permanently diverge and that con- flicting updates to the same key are dealt with identically at all Key-value storage, causal+ consistency, scalable wide-area replica- sites. When combined with causal consistency, this property en- tion, ALPS systems, read transactions sures that clients see only progressively newer versions of keys. In comparison, eventually consistent systems may expose versions out Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for of order. By combining causal consistency and convergent conflict personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are handling, causal+ consistency ensures clients see a causally-correct, not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies conflict-free, and always-progressing data store. bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific Our COPS system (Clusters of Order-Preserving Servers) pro- permission and/or a fee. vides causal+ consistency and is designed to support complex online SOSP ’11, October 23–26, 2011, Cascais, Portugal. applications that are hosted from a small number of large-scale data- Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0977-6/11/10 . $10.00. centers, each of which is composed of front-end servers (clients of 1 COPS) and back-end key-value data stores. COPS executes all put Datacenter and get operations in the local datacenter in a linearizable fashion, Wide‐Area and it then replicates data across datacenters in a causal+ consistent Datacenter order in the background. Replicaon We detail two versions of our COPS system. The regular version, COPS, provides scalable causal+ consistency between individual items in the data store, even if their causal dependencies are spread Datacenter across many different machines in the local datacenter. These consistency properties come at low cost: The performance and overhead of COPS is similar to prior systems, such as those based on log exchange [10, 41], even while providing much greater scalability. We also detail an extended version of the system, COPS-GT, which also provides get transactions that give clients a consistent Clients Data Store Cluster view of multiple keys. Get transactions are needed to obtain a consistent view of multiple keys, even in a fully-linearizable system. Our get transactions require no locks, are non-blocking, and take at most two parallel rounds of intra-datacenter requests. To the best of our knowledge, COPS-GT is the first ALPS system to achieve non-blocking scalable get transactions. These transactions do come at some cost: compared to the regular version of COPS, COPS-GT is less efficient for certain workloads (e.g., write-heavy) and is less Figure 1: The general architecture of modern web services. robust to long network partitions and datacenter failures. Multiple geographically distributed datacenters each have ap- The scalability requirements for ALPS systems creates the largest plication clients that read and write state from a data store that distinction between COPS and prior causal+ consistent systems. is distributed across all of the datacenters. Previous systems required that all data fit on a single machine [2, 12, 41] or that all data that potentially could be accessed together fit Such a distributed storage system has multiple, sometimes com- on a single machine [10]. In comparison, data stored in COPS can peting, goals: availability, low latency, and partition tolerance to be spread across an arbitrary-sized datacenter, and dependencies (or provide an “always on” user experience [16]; scalability to adapt get transactions) can stretch across many servers in the datacenter. to increasing load and storage demands; and a sufficiently strong To the best of our knowledge, COPS is the first scalable system to consistency model to simplify programming and provide users with implement causal+ (and thus causal) consistency. the system behavior that they expect. In slightly more depth, the desirable properties include: The contributions in this paper include: 1. Availability. All operations issued to the data store complete • We explicitly identify four important properties of distributed successfully. No operation can block indefinitely or return an error data stores and use them to define ALPS systems. signifying that data is unavailable. • We name and formally define causal+ consistency. 2. Low Latency. Client operations complete “quickly.” Commer- • We present the design and implementation of COPS, a scalable cial service-level objectives suggest average performance of a few system that efficiently realizes the causal+ consistency model. milliseconds and worse-case performance (i.e., 99.9th percentile) of • We present a non-blocking, lock-free get transaction algorithm 10s or 100s of milliseconds [16]. in COPS-GT that provides clients with a consistent view of 3. Partition Tolerance. The data store continues to operate under multiple keys in at most two rounds of local operations. network partitions, e.g., one separating datacenters in Asia from the • We show through evaluation that COPS has low latency, high United States. throughput, and scales well for all tested workloads; and that 4. High Scalability. The

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