Migratable Paxos: Low Latency and High Throughput Consensus Under Geographically Shifting Workloads

Abstract

Global web services or storage systems have to respond to changes in clients’ access characteristics for lower latency and higher throughput. As access locality is very common, deploying more servers in datacenters close to clients or moving related data between datacenters is the common practice to respond to those changes. Now Paxos-based protocols are widely used to tolerate failures, but the Reconfiguration process (i.e., the process to changing working servers) of existing Paxos-based protocols is slow and costly, thus has a great impact on performance. In this paper, we propose Migratable Paxos (MPaxos), a new Paxos-based consensus protocol that minimizes the duration of reconfiguration and accelerates the migration of data between datacenters, without losing low commit latency and high throughput.