Consistency-based service level agreements for cloud storage

  • Authors:
  • Douglas B. Terry;Vijayan Prabhakaran;Ramakrishna Kotla;Mahesh Balakrishnan;Marcos K. Aguilera;Hussam Abu-Libdeh

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research Silicon Valley;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley;Microsoft Research Silicon Valley;Cornell University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Choosing a cloud storage system and specific operations for reading and writing data requires developers to make decisions that trade off consistency for availability and performance. Applications may be locked into a choice that is not ideal for all clients and changing conditions. Pileus is a replicated key-value store that allows applications to declare their consistency and latency priorities via consistency-based service level agreements (SLAs). It dynamically selects which servers to access in order to deliver the best service given the current configuration and system conditions. In application-specific SLAs, developers can request both strong and eventual consistency as well as intermediate guarantees such as read-my-writes. Evaluations running on a worldwide test bed with geo-replicated data show that the system adapts to varying client-server latencies to provide service that matches or exceeds the best static consistency choice and server selection scheme.