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9. Consistency and Consensus

Is it better to be alive and wrong or right and dead?

​ — Jay Kreps, A Few Notes on Kafka and Jepsen (2013)

Lots of things can go wrong in distributed systems, as discussed in Chapter 8. The simplest way of handling such faults is to simply let the entire service fail, and show the user an error message. If that solution is unacceptable, we need to find ways of tolerating faults—that is, of keeping the service functioning correctly, even if some internal component is faulty.

In this chapter, we will talk about some examples of algorithms and protocols for building fault-tolerant distributed systems. We will assume that all the problems from Chapter 8 can occur: packets can be lost, reordered, duplicated, or arbitrarily delayed in the network; clocks are approximate at best; and nodes can pause (e.g., due to garbage collection) or crash at any time.

The best way of building fault-tolerant systems is to find some general-purpose abstractions with useful guarantees, implement them once, and then let applications rely on those guarantees. This is the same approach as we used with transactions in Chapter 7: by using a transaction, the application can pretend that there are no crashes (atomicity), that nobody else is concurrently accessing the database (isola‐ tion), and that storage devices are perfectly reliable (durability). Even though crashes, race conditions, and disk failures do occur, the transaction abstraction hides those problems so that the application doesn’t need to worry about them.

We will now continue along the same lines, and seek abstractions that can allow an application to ignore some of the problems with distributed systems. For example, one of the most important abstractions for distributed systems is consensus: that is, getting all of the nodes to agree on something. As we shall see in this chapter, reliably reaching consensus in spite of network faults and process failures is a surprisingly tricky problem.

Once you have an implementation of consensus, applications can use it for various purposes. For example, say you have a database with single-leader replication. If the leader dies and you need to fail over to another node, the remaining database nodes can use consensus to elect a new leader. As discussed in “Handling Node Outages” on page 156, it’s important that there is only one leader, and that all nodes agree who the leader is. If two nodes both believe that they are the leader, that situation is called split brain, and it often leads to data loss. Correct implementations of consensus help avoid such problems.

Later in this chapter, in “Distributed Transactions and Consensus”, we will look into algorithms to solve consensus and related problems. But first we first need to explore the range of guarantees and abstractions that can be provided in a distributed system.

We need to understand the scope of what can and cannot be done: in some situa‐ tions, it’s possible for the system to tolerate faults and continue working; in other sit‐ uations, that is not possible. The limits of what is and isn’t possible have been explored in depth, both in theoretical proofs and in practical implementations. We will get an overview of those fundamental limits in this chapter.

Researchers in the field of distributed systems have been studying these topics for decades, so there is a lot of material—we’ll only be able to scratch the surface. In this book we don’t have space to go into details of the formal models and proofs, so we will stick with informal intuitions. The literature references offer plenty of additional depth if you’re interested.

……

Summary

In this chapter we examined the topics of consistency and consensus from several different angles. We looked in depth at linearizability, a popular consistency model: its goal is to make replicated data appear as though there were only a single copy, and to make all operations act on it atomically. Although linearizability is appealing because it is easy to understand—it makes a database behave like a variable in a single-threaded program — it has the downside of being slow, especially in environments with large network delays.

We also explored causality, which imposes an ordering on events in a system (what happened before what, based on cause and effect). Unlike linearizability, which puts all operations in a single, totally ordered timeline, causality provides us with a weaker consistency model: some things can be concurrent, so the version history is like a timeline with branching and merging. Causal consistency does not have the coordi‐ nation overhead of linearizability and is much less sensitive to network problems.

However, even if we capture the causal ordering (for example using Lamport timestamps), we saw that some things cannot be implemented this way: in “Timestamp ordering is not sufficient” on page 347 we considered the example of ensuring that a username is unique and rejecting concurrent registrations for the same username. If one node is going to accept a registration, it needs to somehow know that another node isn’t concurrently in the process of registering the same name. This problem led us toward consensus.

We saw that achieving consensus means deciding something in such a way that all nodes agree on what was decided, and such that the decision is irrevocable. With some digging, it turns out that a wide range of problems are actually reducible to consensus and are equivalent to each other (in the sense that if you have a solution for one of them, you can easily transform it into a solution for one of the others). Such equivalent problems include:

Linearizable compare-and-set registers

The register needs to atomically decide whether to set its value, based on whether its current value equals the parameter given in the operation.

Atomic transaction commit

A database must decide whether to commit or abort a distributed transaction.

Total order broadcast

The messaging system must decide on the order in which to deliver messages.

Locks and leases

When several clients are racing to grab a lock or lease, the lock decides which one successfully acquired it.

Membership/coordination service

Given a failure detector (e.g., timeouts), the system must decide which nodes are alive, and which should be considered dead because their sessions timed out.

Uniqueness constraint

When several transactions concurrently try to create conflicting records with the same key, the constraint must decide which one to allow and which should fail with a constraint violation.

All of these are straightforward if you only have a single node, or if you are willing to assign the decision-making capability to a single node. This is what happens in a single-leader database: all the power to make decisions is vested in the leader, which is why such databases are able to provide linearizable operations, uniqueness con‐ straints, a totally ordered replication log, and more.

However, if that single leader fails, or if a network interruption makes the leader unreachable, such a system becomes unable to make any progress. There are three ways of handling that situation:

  1. Wait for the leader to recover, and accept that the system will be blocked in the meantime. Many XA/JTA transaction coordinators choose this option. This approach does not fully solve consensus because it does not satisfy the termina‐ tion property: if the leader does not recover, the system can be blocked forever.

  2. Manually fail over by getting humans to choose a new leader node and reconfig‐ ure the system to use it. Many relational databases take this approach. It is a kind of consensus by “act of God”—the human operator, outside of the computer sys‐ tem, makes the decision. The speed of failover is limited by the speed at which humans can act, which is generally slower than computers.

  3. Use an algorithm to automatically choose a new leader. This approach requires a consensus algorithm, and it is advisable to use a proven algorithm that correctly handles adverse network conditions [107].

Although a single-leader database can provide linearizability without executing a consensus algorithm on every write, it still requires consensus to maintain its leader‐ ship and for leadership changes. Thus, in some sense, having a leader only “kicks the can down the road”: consensus is still required, only in a different place, and less fre‐ quently. The good news is that fault-tolerant algorithms and systems for consensus exist, and we briefly discussed them in this chapter.

Tools like ZooKeeper play an important role in providing an “outsourced” consen‐ sus, failure detection, and membership service that applications can use. It’s not easy to use, but it is much better than trying to develop your own algorithms that can withstand all the problems discussed in Chapter 8. If you find yourself wanting to do one of those things that is reducible to consensus, and you want it to be fault-tolerant, then it is advisable to use something like ZooKeeper.

Nevertheless, not every system necessarily requires consensus: for example, leaderless and multi-leader replication systems typically do not use global consensus. The con‐ flicts that occur in these systems (see “Handling Write Conflicts”) are a consequence of not having consensus across different leaders, but maybe that’s okay: maybe we simply need to cope without linearizability and learn to work better with data that has branching and merging version histories.

This chapter referenced a large body of research on the theory of distributed systems. Although the theoretical papers and proofs are not always easy to understand, and sometimes make unrealistic assumptions, they are incredibly valuable for informing practical work in this field: they help us reason about what can and cannot be done, and help us find the counterintuitive ways in which distributed systems are often flawed. If you have the time, the references are well worth exploring.

This brings us to the end of Part II of this book, in which we covered replication (Chapter 5), partitioning (Chapter 6), transactions (Chapter 7), distributed system failure models (Chapter 8), and finally consistency and consensus (Chapter 9). Now that we have laid a firm foundation of theory, in Part III we will turn once again to more practical systems, and discuss how to build powerful applications from heterogeneous building blocks.

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