Tag Archives: data migration

Paper Summary: Bolt-On Global Consistency for the Cloud

June 12, 2019 alekseyc

lat1 — Figure 1. Latency improvement from going multi-cloud. Minimum read latency SLO feasible when using a single provider for data storage versus when using multiple providers.

This paper appeared in SOCC 2018, but caught my Paxos attention only recently. The premise of the paper is to provide strong consistency in a heterogeneous storage system spanning multiple cloud providers and storage platforms. Going across cloud providers is challenging, since storage services at different clouds cannot directly talk to each other and replicate the data with strong consistency. The benefits of spanning multiple clouds, however, may worth the hustle, since a heterogeneous system will be both better protected from cloud provider outages, and provide better performance by placing the data closer to the users. The latter aspect is emphasized in the paper, and as seen in the figure, going multi-cloud can reduce latency by up to ~25%.

Figure 2. Comparison of (a) classic Paxos and (b) CPaxos.

To solve the issue of consistent cross-cloud replication, authors propose to use Cloud Paxos (CPaxos), a Paxos variant designed to work with followers supporting a very minimal and common set of operations: get and conditional put. In CPaxos, clients act as prospers, and storage systems serve the role of the followers. The followers are not really “smart” in this protocol, and most of the Paxos logic shifts to the client-proposers (Figure 2).

The prepare phase in CPaxos simply gathers the state from the followers, making the proposer decide for itself whether the followers would have accepted it with the current ballot or not. If the proposer thinks it would have been accepted, it will try updating the followers’ state. Doing this, however, requires some precautions from the followers, since their state may have changed after the proposer made a decision to proceed. For that matter, CPaxos uses conditional put (or compare-and-set) operation, making the followers update their state only if it has not changed since it was read by the proposer. This ensures that at most one proposer can succeed with changing the state of the majority of followers.

Figure X. Object log. Each slot corresponds to some version, and can be committed at some ballot #. — Figure 3. Object log. Each slot corresponds to some version, and can be committed at some ballot #.

I visualize this as a log to represent changes in some object’s state. The new version of an object corresponds to a new slot in the log, while each slot can be tried with different ballot by different proposers. The put operation succeeds at the follower only if the value at the slot and a ballot has not been written by some other proposer. In case a proposer does not get a majority of successful updates, it needs to start from the beginning: increase its ballot, perform a read and make a decision whether to proceed with state update. Upon reaching the majority acks on state update, the proposer sends a message to flip the commit bit to make sure each follower knows the global state of the operation.

This basic protocol has quite a few problems with performance. Latency is large, since at least 2 round-trips are required to reach consensus, since every proposer needs to run 2 phases (+ send a commit message). Additionally, increasing the number of proposers acting on the same objects will lead to the growth in conflict, requiring repeated restarts and further increasing latency. CPaxos mitigates these problems to a degree. For example, it tries to commit values on the fast path by avoiding the prepare phase entirely and starting an accept phase on what it believes will be next version of an object with ballot #0. If the proposer’s knowledge of the object’s state (version, ballot) is outdated, the conditional put will fail and the proposer will try again, but this time with full two phases to learn the correct state first. However, if the proposer is lucky, an update can go in just one round-trip. This optimization, of course, works only when an object is rarely updated concurrently by multiple proposers; otherwise dueling leaders become a problem not only for progress, but for safety as well, since two proposers may write different values for the same version using the same ballot. This creates a bit of a conundrum on when the value becomes safely anchored and won’t ever get lost.

Figure 3. Dueling leaders both start opportunistic accept with ballot #0, each writing their own values (green and blue) — Figure 4. Dueling leaders both start opportunistic accept with ballot #0, each writing their own values (green and blue)

Figure 4. Which value to recover in case of the failure? Both green and blue are on the same ballot and have the same number of live nodes — Figure 5. Which value to recover in case of the failure? Both green and blue are on the same ballot and have the same number of live nodes

Consider an example in which two proposers write different values: green and blue to the same version using ballot #0 (Figure 4 on the left). One of the proposers is able to write to the majority, before it becomes unresponsive. At the same time, one green follower crashes as well, leading to a situation with two followers having green value and two being blue (Figure 5 on the right). The remaining proposer has no knowledge of whether the green or blue value needs to be recovered (remember, they are both on the same ballot in the same slot/version!). To avoid this situation, CPaxos expands the fast path commit quorum from majority to a supermajority, namely \(\left \lceil{\frac{3f}{2}}\right \rceil +1\) followers, where \(2f+1\) is the total number of followers, and f is the tolerated number of follower failures, allowing the anchored/committed value to be in a majority of any majority of followers . Having this creates an interesting misbalance in fault tolerance: while CPaxos still tolerates \(f[\latex] node failures and can make progress by degrading to full 2 phases of the protocol, it can lose an uncommitted value even if it was accepted by the majority when up to [latex]f\) followers fail.

Figure 5. (a) messages are sent at the same time; delivery time is different increasing the duration of inconsistency/conflicting state. (b) some messages are sent with delay to provide similar arrival time and reduce the duration of inconsistent state — Figure 6. (a) messages are sent at the same time; delivery time is different increasing the duration of inconsistency/conflicting state. (b) some messages are sent with delay to provide similar arrival time and reduce the duration of inconsistent state

Proposer conflicts are a big problem for CPaxos, so naturally the protocol tries to mitigate it. The approach taken here reduces the duration in which possible conflicts may occur. As CPaxos is deployed over many datacenters, the latencies between datacenters are not likely to be uniform. This means, that a prepare or accept messages from some proposer reach different datacenters at different times, creating an inconsistent state. When two proposers operate concurrently, they are more likely so observe this inconsistency: as both proposers quickly update their neighboring datacenters, they run the risk of not reaching the required supermajority due to the conflicting state (Figure 6(a)) created by some messages being not as quick to reach remaining datacenters. To avoid rejecting both proposers, CPaxos schedules sending messages in a way to deliver them to all datacenters at roughly the same time. This reduces the duration of inconsistent state, allowing to order some concurrent operations (Figure 6(b)).

Figure 6. Degradation in write throughput under different conflict rates. — Figure 7. Degradation in write throughput under different conflict rates.

Despite the above mitigation strategy, conflicts still affect CPaxos greatly. The authors are rather open about this, and show their system CRIC with CPaxos degrading quicker than Paxos and Fast Paxos as the conflict rate increases. However, in the low conflict scenario, which authors argue is more likely in real world applications, CRIC and CPaxos improve on performance compared to Paxos/Fast Paxos, especially for reading the data. This is because reads in CPaxos are carried out in one round-trip-time (RTT) by client-proposer contacting all followers and waiting for at least a majority of them to reply. If the client sees the latest version with a commit flag set in the majority, it can return the data. Otherwise, it will wait to hear from more followers and use their logs to determine the safe value to return. In some rare cases when the proposer cannot determine the latest safe value, it will perform the recovery by running the write path of CPaxos with the value to recover (highest ballot value or highest frequency value if more than one value share the ballot).

Figure 7. Read and write latency. — Figure 8. Read and write latency.

Some Thoughts

The motivation of the paper was to make strongly consistent system spanning multiple clouds providers and storage systems for the benefit of improved latency though leveraging the location of datacenters of these different providers. However, CRIC and CPaxos protocol requires a lot of communication, even on the read path. During reads, a client-proposer contacts all CPaxos nodes, located at all datacenters, and in best case still needs the majority replies. As such the latency benefit here comes from trying to get not just one node closer to the client, but a majority of nodes. This may be difficult to achieve in large systems spanning many datacenters. I think sharding the system and placing it on subset of nodes based on access locality can benefit here greatly. For instance, Facebook’s Akkio paper claims to have significant reduction in traffic and storage by having fewer replicas and making data follow access patterns. In our recent paper, we have also illustrated a few very simple data migration policies and possible latency improvement from implementing these policies.
One RTT reads in “happy path” can be implemented on top of regular MutliPaxos without contacting all nodes in the systems. Reading from the majority of followers is good enough for this most of the time, while in rare circumstances the reader may need to retry the read from any one node. More on this will be in our upcoming HotStorage ’19 paper.
The optimization to delay message sending in order to deliver messages at roughly the same time to all nodes can help with conflict reduction in other protocols that suffer from this problem. EPaxos comes to mind right away, as it is affected by the “dueling leaders” problem as well. Actually, CPaxos and EPaxos are rather similar. Both assume low conflict rate to have single round trip “happy path” writes and reads. When the assumption breaks, and there is a conflict, both switch to two phases. EPaxos is better here in a sense that the first opportunistic phase is not totally wasted and can be used as phase-1 in the two phase mode, whereas CPaxos has to start all the way from the beginning due to the API limitation on the follower side.

Playing Around

Keep The Data Where You Use It

November 19, 2018 alekseyc

As trivial as it sounds, but keeping the data close to where it is consumed can drastically improve the performance of the large globe-spanning cloud applications, such as social networks, ecommerce and IoT. These applications rely on some database systems to make sure that all the data can be accessed quickly. The de facto method of keeping the data close to the users is full replication. Many fully replicated systems, however, still have a single region responsible for orchestrating the writes, making the data available locally only for reads and not the updates.

Moreover, full replication becomes rather challenging when strong consistency is desired, since the cost of synchronizing all database replicas on the global scale is large. Many strongly consistent datastores resort to partial replication across a handful of nearby regions to keep the replication latency low. This creates situations when some clients close to the regions in which data is replicated may experience much better access latency than someone reaching out from the other side of the globe.

Data and consumer are collocated. — No access penalty when data and consumer are in the same region

Data and consumer are in different regions — Access penalty (289 ms in this case) when data and consumer are in different regions

Despite the obvious benefits of adapting to locality changes, many databases offer only static partitioning. Of course, some data stores have the migration capability, but still often lack the mechanisms to determine where the data must be moved. Quite a few orthogonal solutions provide capabilities to collocate related data close together or use days or weeks’ worth of logs to compute better data placement offline. Meanwhile, Facebook’s aggressive data migration helps them reduce the access latency by 50% and save on both storage and networking.

We (@AlekseyCharapko, @AAilijiang and @MuratDemirbas) investigated the criteria for quick, live data migration in response to changes on access locality. We posit that effective data-migration policies should:

Minimize access latency,
Preserve load balancing with regards to data storage and processing capacity
Preserve collocation of related data, and
Minimize the number of data migrations.

Policies

We developed four simple migration policies aimed at optimizing the data placement. Our policies operate at an arbitrary data-granularity, be it an individual key-value pairs, micro-shards, or the partitions. For simplicity, I say that policies work on objects that represent some data of an arbitrary granularity.

The main point we address with the policies is minimizing access locality, with each policy using a different heuristic to make a data-placement decision. Once the policy finds the most optimal location for an object, it checks the load balancing constraints to adjust the data migration decision as required.

Our simplest policy, the n-consecutive accesses policy, uses a threshold of consecutive accesses to the object to make the placement decision. Although simple, this policy works well for workloads with strong locality in a single region. Majority accesses policy keeps track of some request statistics and uses it to find the region with the most accesses to an object over some time interval. It then migrates the data over to that region.

The exponential moving average (EMA) policy takes a different approach and computes the average region for all requests to the object. The average region is computed as an exponential moving average favoring the most recent requests. This policy can potentially find better placement for objects that have more than one high-access region. However, it requires the regions to have numerical IDs arranged in the order of region’s proximity to each other. This policy falters for deployments with complicated geography and may require multiple migrations to move data to the best location. Another disadvantage of EMA is that it takes longer to settle and requires many data migrations. Unlike other policies that can move the data directly to the desired region, EMA can only migrate objects to one of the neighboring regions, making adjustment such as going from region (1) to (3) include a temporary migration to region (2).

Exponential moving average topology; regions have left and right neighbors

Finally, the center-of-gravity (CoG) policy calculates the optimal object placement by taking into account the distribution of all requests to an object and the distances between the datacenters. CoG policy calculates the region closest to the central location for any access locality workloads. CoG can collect the request statistics similar to the majority accesses policy and make a placement decision only after some time has elapsed since last decision. Alternatively, it can use a continuous metric to assign each region a score corresponding to its weight in the workload, adjust the score and recompute the best object placement with every request.

Computing CoG Weights (L-scores). Region with lowest score is most central to the current workload’s access distribution. Japan is the object’s owner here, despite Australia having more requests overall. L_jp = 0.4 * 128 + 0.15 * 165 + 0.13 * 318 + 0.08 * 165 = 130.49

Some Evaluation

I’ve simulated protocols under different access locality scenarios and calculated the latency of inter-region access and the number of object movements each policy makes. In the simulations, I used 3000 distinct objects, initially assigned to a random region in the cluster of 15 regions. I used the AWS inter-region latencies to specify the distances between simulated regions. To my surprise, even the most basic policies showed good improvement over static random placement of data.

In the first experiment, the objects were accessed according to a normal distribution. Each object has a ID assigned to it, and some Normal distribution dictates the probability of the drawing the ID each region. All regions have distributions with the same variance, but different means, making each region predominantly accessing some of the objects, and having some group of objects being more-or-less shared across the regions with adjacent IDs.

Locality Workload. 3000 Objects, 15 regions. Probability of object access is controlled by N(200z,100), where z is region ID in range [0, 15)

In this experiment, both CoG and majority accesses policy showed the best results in terms of latency and the number of object movements. This is because the workload almost always favors a single region, and in rarer cases shares the object between two regions. This makes majority heuristic that only considers one region work well. Similarly, 3-consecutive accesses policy shows good latency, but it generates a lot of jitter constantly moving shared objects between neighboring regions.

When the workload is no longer predominantly single region dominant for every key, single-region heuristic policies perform worse. For instance, equally sharing an object between utmost 3 regions out of 15 causes majority and 3-consecutive accesses policies to lock in to one of the sharing regions instead of optimizing the latency for all sharing regions. CoG policy can place the data in a region optimal for all 3 regions (and not even necessarily in one of the sharing regions) and optimize the latency better than a single-region heuristic, topology unaware policies. EMA policy is at a big disadvantage here, since it relies on ID assignments to dictate the proximity of regions. However, the complex geography of AWS datacenters makes a good ID assignment nearly impossible, causing EMA to sometimes overshoot the best region and settle in less optimal one.

Access is shared equally with up to 3 random regions.

Access locality may fluctuate on a regular basis, and the policy needs to be able to adopt to such changes and adjust the system to keep the latencies low. In this experiment I gradually adjust the normal distribution used in the earlier experiment to make a gradual workload switch. In the figure below, the system ran for enough time to make all objects switch the access locality to the neighboring region. However, the policies adopt well to the change, keeping low latency despite the moving workload. EMA is one notable exception again, as it first gets better latency and the gradually degrades until reaching a steady state (In a separate experiment I observe EMA stabilizing over at around 59 ms of latency)

Previous experiments did not consider the effect of load balancing. However, a good data-migration policy should refrain from migrating data to overloaded regions. In the next experiment I applied load-balancing filter to the CoG policy to make the migration procedure first compute the best region for the object, check if that region has the capacity, and if no capacity is available, move the data to the next best region with enough processing/storage capacity. Here I used 5 regions and 1000 objects, and limited each region to storing at most 25% of all data. I ran a heavily skewed workload with 80% of all requests coming from a single region. Under these conditions the CoG policy achieves very low average latency. However, as evidenced by the disbalance graph, all objects migrate over to a single region. If load balancing is enabled, no region becomes overloaded, but latency improvement becomes more modest.

Concluding Remarks

Having data close to the consumers can dramatically improve the access latency. For some databases, this means doing full replication, for other this may involve moving data or the owner/write role from one region to another. It is important to make sure the data is moved to a right location. I have looked at four simple rules or policies for determining the data migration and ran some simulations on these.

There are a few lessons I have learned so far from this:

Topology aware rules/polices work better for a larger variety of situations
Simple rules, such as just looking a number of consecutive requests coming from a region or determining the majority accesses region can also work surprisingly well, but not always. These tend to break when access locality is not concentrated in a single region, but shared across a few regions in the cluster
EMA looked interesting on paper. It allowed to have just a single number updated with every request to determine the optimal data placement, but it performed rather bad in most experiments. The main reason for this is complicated geography of datacenters.
Optimizing for latency and adjusting for load balancing constraints to prevent region overload can be done in two separate steps. My simple two-stage policy (presently) looks at load balancing for each object separately. This becomes a first-come-first-serve system, but I am not sure yet whether this can become a problem.
EMA policy takes multiple hops to move data to better region, while n-consecutive accesses policy has constant jitter for objects shared by some regions

I have not studied much about data-collocation in my experiments, nor designed the policies to take this into consideration. One of the reasons is that I think related objects will have similar access locality, causing them to migrate to same datacenters. However, this is just a guess, and I need to investigate this further.