Colony : a Hybrid Consistency System for Highly-Available Collaborative Edge Computing
Ilyas Toumlilt · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2021
Immediate response, autonomy and availability is brought to edge applications, such as gaming, cooperative engineering, or in-the-field information sharing, by distributing and replicating data at the edge. However, application developers and users demand the highest possible consistency guarantees, and specific support for group collaboration. To address this challenge, COLONY guarantees Transactional Causal Plus Consistency (TCC+) globally, dovetailing with Snapshot Isolation within edge groups. To help with scalability, fault tolerance and security, its logical communication topology is tree-like, with replicated roots in the core cloud, but with the flexibility to migrate a node or a group. Despite this hybrid approach, applications enjoy the same semantics everywhere in the topology. Our experiments show that local caching and peer groups improve throughput and response time significantly, performance is not affected in offline mode, and that migration is seamless.