Commodifying Replicated State Machines with OpenReplica

Abstract

This paper describes OpenReplica, an open service that provides replication and synchronization support for large-scale distributed systems. OpenReplica is designed to commodify Paxos replicated state machines by providing infrastructure for their construction, deployment and maintenance. OpenReplica is based on a novel Paxos replicated state machine implementation that employs an object-oriented approach in which the system actively creates and maintains live replicas for user-provided objects. Clients access these replicated objects transparently as if they are local objects. OpenReplica supports complex distributed synchronization constructs through a multi-return mechanism that enables the replicated objects to control the execution flow of their clients, in essence providing blocking and non-blocking method invocations that can be used to implement richer synchronization constructs. Further, it supports elasticity requirements of cloud deployments by enabling any number of servers to be replaced dynamically. A rack-aware placement manager places replicas on nodes that are unlikely to fail together. Experiments with the system show that the latencies associated with replication are comparable to ZooKeeper, and that the system scales well.