Dynamo: Amazons Highly Available Key-value Store
Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels
Motivation
Build a distributed storage system:
Scale Simple: key-value Highly available Guarantee Service Level Agreements (SLA)
System Assumptions and Requirements
Query Model:
simple read and write operations to a data
item that is uniquely identified by a key.
ACID Properties:
Durability.
Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation,
Efficiency:
latency requirements which are in general measured at the 99.9th percentile of the distribution. operation environment is assumed to be non-hostile and there are no security related requirements such as authentication and authorization.
Other Assumptions:
Service Level Agreements (SLA)
Application can deliver its
functionality in abounded time: Every dependency in the
platform needs to deliver its functionality with even tighter bounds.
Example: service guaranteeing
that it will provide a response within 300ms for 99.9% of its requests for a peak client load of 500 requests per second.
Service-oriented architecture of Amazons platform
Design Consideration
Sacrifice strong consistency for availability
Conflict resolution is executed during read
instead of write, i.e. always writeable. Other principles:
Incremental scalability. Symmetry. Decentralization. Heterogeneity.
Summary of techniques used in Dynamo and their advantages
Problem
Partitioning High Availability for writes
Technique
Consistent Hashing Vector clocks with reconciliation during reads
Advantage
Incremental Scalability Version size is decoupled from update rates. Provides high availability and durability guarantee when some of the replicas are not available. Synchronizes divergent replicas in the background. Preserves symmetry and avoids having a centralized registry for storing membership and node liveness information.
Handling temporary failures
Sloppy Quorum and hinted handoff
Recovering from permanent failures
Anti-entropy using Merkle trees
Membership and failure detection
Gossip-based membership protocol and failure detection.
Partition Algorithm
Consistent hashing: the output
range of a hash function is treated as a fixed circular space or ring.
Virtual
Nodes: Each node can
be responsible for more than one virtual node.
Advantages of using virtual nodes
If a node becomes unavailable the
load handled by this node is evenly dispersed across the remaining available nodes. When a node becomes available again, the newly available node accepts a roughly equivalent amount of load from each of the other available nodes. The number of virtual nodes that a node is responsible can decided based on its capacity, accounting for heterogeneity in the physical infrastructure.
Replication
Each data item is
replicated at N hosts. preference list: The list of nodes that is responsible for storing a particular key.
Data Versioning
A put() call may return to its caller before the
update has been applied at all the replicas A get() call may return many versions of the same object. Challenge: an object having distinct version sub-histories,
which the system will need to reconcile in the future.
Solution:
uses vector clocks in order to capture causality between different versions of the same object.
Vector Clock
A vector clock is a list of (node, counter)
pairs. Every version of every object is associated with one vector clock. If the counters on the first objects clock are less-than-or-equal to all of the nodes in the second clock, then the first is an ancestor of the second and can be forgotten.
Vector clock example
Execution of get () and put () operations
1. Route its request through a generic load
balancer that will select a node based on load information. 2. Use a partition-aware client library that routes requests directly to the appropriate coordinator nodes.
Sloppy Quorum
R/W is the minimum number of nodes that
must participate in a successful read/write operation. Setting R + W > N yields a quorum-like system. In this model, the latency of a get (or put) operation is dictated by the slowest of the R (or W) replicas. For this reason, R and W are usually configured to be less than N, to provide better latency.
Hinted handoff
Assume N = 3. When A
is temporarily down or unreachable during a write, send replica to D. D is hinted that the replica is belong to A and it will deliver to A when A is recovered. Again: always writeable
Other techniques
Replica synchronization:
Merkle hash tree.
Membership and Failure Detection:
Gossip
Implementation
Java
Local persistence component allows for
different storage engines to be plugged in:
Berkeley Database (BDB) Transactional Data Store: object of tens of kilobytes MySQL: object of > tens of kilobytes BDB Java Edition, etc.
Evaluation
Evaluation
