Abstract

Online services distribute and replicate state across geographically diverse data centers and direct user requests to the closest or least loaded site. While effectively ensuring low latency responses, this approach is at odds with maintaining cross-site consistency. This talks presents RedBlue Consistency. RedBlue consistency enables blue operations to be fast (and eventually consistent) while the remaining red operations are strongly consistent (and slow). To make use of fast operation whenever possible and only resort to strong consistency when needed, we identified conditions delineating when operations can be blue and must be red, and introduced a method that increases the space of potential blue operations by breaking them into separate generator and shadow phases.

Bio Author : Allen Clement is a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. His primary interests lie in fault tolerance, consistency and building robust distributed systems. He obtained his PhD at the University of Texas in 2010, under the supervision of Lorenzo Alvisi, working on byzantine fault tolerance.