A library for services transparent replication
Paola Martins Pereira, Fernando Luís Dotti, Cristina Meinhardt, Odorico Machado Mendizabal · 2019
State Machine Replication is a well-known approach to develop fault-tolerant application. Although it seems conceptually simple, building replicated state machines is not a trivial task. The developer has to be acquainted with aspects of the inner working of the specific agreement protocol to correctly develop and deploy the replicated service (and auxiliary processes - e.g. Paxos roles), instead of focusing on the specific service. In this work we propose a replication library that facilitates the development and deployment of fault-tolerant services, and provides replication transparency to service builders. This library allows to deploy a base SMR on top of which new services can be registered at runtime. A service builder focuses on service implementation and registers the service with the base SMR to enjoy the benefits of replication. Besides separating the complexity of providing a replicated infrastructure from service implementation, multiple services share the same consensus and replication infrastructure, allowing cost amortization. According to our evaluation, this approach leads to higher overall throughput compared to the separate deployment of different SMRs over the same resources.