Title
Geo-distribution of actor-based services
Abstract
Many service applications use actors as a programming model for the middle tier, to simplify synchronization, fault-tolerance, and scalability. However, efficient operation of such actors in multiple, geographically distant datacenters is challenging, due to the very high communication latency. Caching and replication are essential to hide latency and exploit locality; but it is not a priori clear how to combine these techniques with the actor programming model. We present Geo, an open-source geo-distributed actor system that improves performance by caching actor states in one or more datacenters, yet guarantees the existence of a single latest version by virtue of a distributed cache coherence protocol. Geo's programming model supports both volatile and persistent actors, and supports updates with a choice of linearizable and eventual consistency. Our evaluation on several workloads shows substantial performance benefits, and confirms the advantage of supporting both replicated and single-instance coherence protocols as configuration choices. For example, replication can provide fast, always-available reads and updates globally, while batching of linearizable storage accesses at a single location can boost the throughput of an order processing workload by 7x.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3133931
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cloud Services,Consistency,Geo-Distribution,Virtual Actors
Eventual consistency,Locality,Programming paradigm,Computer science,Distributed cache,Exploit,Throughput,Scalability,Cloud computing,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
OOPSLA
2475-1421
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.47
27
Authors
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Philip A. Bernstein195533031.60
Sebastian Burckhardt272534.72
Sergey Bykov3673.45
Natacha Crooks4212.07
Jose Faleiro5193.76
Gabriel Kliot650722.18
Alok Kumbhare740.47
Muntasir Raihan Rahman845521.21
Vivek Shah971.87
Adriana Szekeres10734.96
Jorgen Thelin11633.00