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Modular Composition of Coordination Services

Kfir Lev-Ari
Edward Bortnikov
Idit Keidar
Alexander Shraer
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) (2016)

Abstract

Coordination services like ZooKeeper, etcd, Doozer, and Consul are increasingly used by distributed applications for consistent, reliable, and high-speed coordination. When applications execute in multiple geographic regions, coordination service deployments trade-off between performance, (achieved by using independent services in separate regions), and consistency. We present a system design for modular composition of services that addresses this trade-off. We implement ZooNet, a prototype of this concept over ZooKeeper. ZooNet allows users to compose multiple instances of the service in a consistent fashion, facilitating applications that execute in multiple regions. In ZooNet, clients that access only local data suffer no performance penalty compared to working with a standard single ZooKeeper. Clients that use remote and local ZooKeepers show up to 7x performance improvement compared to consistent solutions available today.