Message Futures: Fast Commitment of Transactions in Multi-datacenter Environments
Faisal Nawab, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi · 2013
Geo-replication of large Internet services is increasingly deployed for better data locality and fault tolerance. Maintaining consistency across datacenters is expensive and requires wide-area communication. This renders current solutions to either settle for weaker forms of consistency or suffer from large delays. In this work we present Message Futures, a strongly consistent concurrency control manager with low commit latency to ensure mutual consistency of replicas across datacenters. By judicial message passing of relevant information and at opportune time intervals, Message Futures can also enforce different priority levels of access, where each datacenter experiences a commit latency relative to its priority. In fact, in many common cases, transactions can be committed locally without the need for any communication. An experimental evaluation of Message Futures on a geo-replicated multi-datacenter setting is presented. We show that Message Futures achieves a commit latency around one RTT (Round-Trip Time) for datacenters with identical priority, and a latency comparable to committing locally for high priority datacenters.