Warranties for faster strong consistency
Jed Liu, Tom Magrino, Owen Arden, Michael D. George, Andrew C. Myers · 2014
We present a new mechanism, warranties, to enable building distributed systems with linearizable transac-tions. A warranty is a time-limited assertion about one or more distributed objects. These assertions generalize op-timistic concurrency control, improving throughput be-cause clients holding warranties need not communicate to verify the warranty’s assertion. Updates that might cause an active warranty to become false are delayed un-til the warranty expires, trading write latency for read latency. For workloads biased toward reads, warranties improve scalability and system throughput. Warranties can be expressed using language-level computations, and they integrate harmoniously into the programming model as a form of memoization. Experiments with some non-trivial programs demonstrate that warranties enable high performance despite the simple programming model. 1