Lazy replication. Exploiting the semantics of distributed services

Abstract

To provide high availability for services such as mail or bulletin boards, data must be replicated. One way to guarantee consistency of replicated data is to force service operations to occur in the same order at all sites, but this approach is expensive. In this paper, we propose lazy replication as a way to preserve consistency by exploiting the semantics of the service's operations to relax the constraints on ordering. Three kinds of operations are supported: operations for which the clients define the required order dynamically during the execution, operations for which the service defines the order, and operations that must be globally ordered with respect to both client ordered and service ordered operations. The method performs well in terms of response time, amount of stored state, number of messages, and availability. It is especially well suited to applications in which most operations require only the client-defined order.