Consus: Taming the Paxi

TL;DR

Consus is a geo-replicated transactional key-value store that introduces a novel commit protocol reducing transaction latency to three wide area message delays, combining multiple Paxos implementations for high performance and strong consistency.

Contribution

The paper presents a new commit protocol for geo-replicated systems and integrates optimized Paxos variants to achieve low latency and high availability.

Findings

Reduces transaction commit latency to three wide area message delays

Provides strong consistency with high availability

Open source implementation laid out for future evaluation

Abstract

Consus is a strictly serializable geo-replicated transactional key-value store. The key contribution of Consus is a new commit protocol that reduces the cost of executing a transaction to three wide area message delays in the common case. Augmenting the commit protocol are multiple Paxos implementations optimized for different purposes. Together the different implementations and optimizations comprise a cohesive system that provides low latency, high availability, and strong guarantees. This paper describes the techniques implemented in the open source release of Consus, and lays the groundwork for evaluating Consus once the system implementation is sufficiently robust for a thorough evaluation.