paxos

  • PigPaxos: continue devouring communication bottlenecks in distributed consensus.

    ·

    This is a short follow-up to Murat’s PigPaxos post. I strongly recommend reading it first as it provides full context for what is to follow. And yes, it also includes the explanation of what pigs have to do with Paxos. Short Recap of PigPaxos. In our recent SIGMOD paper we looked at the bottleneck of…

    Read More

  • One Page Summary: Ring Paxos

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    This paper (Ring Paxos: A high-throughput atomic broadcast protocol) has been out for quite some time, but it addresses a problem still relevant in many distributed consensus protocols. Ring Paxos aims to reduce the communication load in the Paxos cluster and provide better scalability. As we have shown in our SIGMOD 2019 paper, communication is…

    Read More

  • Paper Summary: Bolt-On Global Consistency for the Cloud

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    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…

    Read More

  • One Page Summary: “PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat”

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    PaxosStore paper, published in VLDB 2017, describes the large scale, multi-datacenter storage system used in WeChat. As the name may suggest, it uses Paxos to provide storage consistency. The system claims to provide storage for many components of the WeChat application, with 1.5TB of traffic per day and tens of thousands of queries per second…

    Read More

  • Modeling Paxos Performance in Wide Area – Part 3

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    Earlier I looked at modeling paxos performance in local networks, however nowadays people (companies) use paxos and its flavors in the wide area as well. Take Google Spanner and CockroachDB as an example. I was naturally curious to expand my performance model into wide area networks as well. Since our lab worked on WAN coordination…

    Read More

  • Modeling Paxos Performance – Part 2

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    In the previous posts I started to explore node-scalability of paxos-style protocols. In this post I will look at processing overheads that I estimate with the help of a queue or a processing pipeline. I show how these overheads cap the performance and affect the latency at different cluster loads. I look at the scalability for…

    Read More

  • Paxos Performance Modeling – Part 1.5

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    This post is a quick update/conclusion to the part 1. So, does the network variations make any impact at all? In the earlier simulation I showed some small performance degradation going from 3 to 5 nodes. The reality is that for paxos, network behavior makes very little difference on scalability, and in some cases no difference at…

    Read More

  • Do not Blame (only) Network for Your Paxos Scalability Issues. (PPM Part 1)

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    In the past few months our lab has been doing a lot of work with different flavors of paxos consensus algorithm. Paxos and its numerous flavors are widely used in today’s cloud infrastructure. Distributed systems rely on it for many different tasks to ensure safe operation. For instance, coordination services use some consensus protocol flavor…

    Read More

  • EPaxos: Consensus with no leader

    ·

    Placeholder Icon

    In my previous post I talked about Raft consensus algorithm. Raft has a strong leader which may present some problems under certain circumstances, for example in case of leader failure or when deployed over a wide area network (WAN). Egalitarian Paxos, or EPaxos, discards the notion of a leader and allows each node to be…

    Read More