An optimized Multi-Paxos consensus protocol for practical cloud storage applications

Abstract

For cloud storage applications running typical Multi-Paxos protocol, the processing of a client command normally consists of two steps, i.e., commit and apply. Commit step is to guarantee a client command achieves identical sequence number among all storage replicas; apply step is to execute a committed client commands one by one in sequence and return back the execution result to client. In practice, committed client commands are not necessarily be applied after all its previous commands get applied. In view of this observation, an optimization for Multi-Paxos protocol is proposed to improve system performance for cloud storage applications in this paper. Compared with typical Multi-Paxos protocol, we allow out-of-order applying of committed client commands. And a committed client command can be applied as long as it has no dependency on its previous commands or all dependencies are resolved. Comparison between two protocols is implemented and analyzed to prove the feasibility of our proposal.