Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores

Abstract: We present a framework for concurrency control and availability in multi-datacenter datastores. While we consider Google's Megastore as our motivating example, we define general abstractions for key components, making our solution extensible to any system that satisfies the abstraction properties. We first develop and analyze a transaction management and replication protocol based on a straightforward implementation of the Paxos algorithm. Our investigation reveals that this protocol acts as a concurrency prevention mechanism rather than a concurrency control mechanism. We then propose an enhanced protocol called Paxos with Combination and Promotion (Paxos-CP) that provides true transaction concurrency while requiring the same per instance message complexity as the basic Paxos protocol. Finally, we compare the performance of Paxos and Paxos-CP in a multi-datacenter experimental study, and we demonstrate that Paxos-CP results in significantly fewer aborted transactions than basic Paxos.