In this paper we propose a novel approach to manage the throughput vs latency tradeoff that emerges when managing updates in geo-replicated systems. Our approach consists in allowing full concurrency when processing local updates and using a deferred local serialisation procedure before shipping updates to remote datacenters. This strategy allows to implement inexpensive mechanisms to ensure system consistency requirements while avoiding intrusive effects on update operations, a major performance limitation of previous systems. We have implemented our approach as a variant of Riak KV. Our extensive evaluation shows that we outperform sequencer-based approaches by almost an order of magnitude in the maximum achievable throughput. Furthermore, unlike previous sequencer-free solutions, our approach reaches nearly optimal remote update visibility latencies without limiting throughput.
@article{arxiv.1702.01786,
title = {Unobtrusive Deferred Update Stabilization for Efficient Geo-Replication},
author = {Chathuri Gunawardhana and Manuel Bravo and Luís Rodrigues},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.01786},
year = {2017}
}