Building a Distributed Log from Scratch, Part 2: Data Replication

In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication.

We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we have a durable log, it’s a single point of failure (SPOF). If the machine where the log data is stored dies, we’re SOL. Recall that one of our three priorities with this system is high availability, so the question is how do we achieve high availability and fault tolerance?

With high availability, we’re specifically talking about ensuring continuity of reads and writes. A server failing shouldn’t preclude either of these, or at least unavailability should be kept to an absolute minimum and without the need for operator intervention. Ensuring this continuity should be fairly obvious: we eliminate the SPOF. To do that, we replicate the data. Replication can also be a means for increasing scalability, but for now we’re only looking at this through the lens of high availability.

There are a number of ways we can go about replicating the log data. Broadly speaking, we can group the techniques into two different categories: gossip/multicast protocols and consensus protocols. The former includes things like epidemic broadcast trees, bimodal multicast, SWIM, HyParView, and NeEM. These tend to be eventually consistent and/or stochastic. The latter, which I’ve described in more detail here, includes 2PC/3PC, Paxos, Raft, Zab, and chain replication. These tend to favor strong consistency over availability.

So there are a lot of ways we can replicate data, but some of these solutions are better suited than others to this particular problem. Since ordering is an important property of a log, consistency becomes important for a replicated log. If we read from one replica and then read from another, it’s important those views of the log don’t conflict with each other. This more or less rules out the stochastic and eventually consistent options, leaving us with consensus-based replication.

There are essentially two components to consensus-based replication schemes: 1) designate a leader who is responsible for sequencing writes and 2) replicate the writes to the rest of the cluster.

Designating a leader can be as simple as a configuration setting, but the purpose of replication is fault tolerance. If our configured leader crashes, we’re no longer able to accept writes. This means we need the leader to be dynamic. It turns out leader election is a well-understood problem, so we’ll get to this in a bit.

Once a leader is established, it needs to replicate the data to followers. In general, this can be done by either waiting for all replicas or waiting for only a quorum (majority) of replicas. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Pros Cons
All Replicas Tolerates f failures with f+1 replicas Latency pegged to slowest replica
Quorum Hides delay from a slow replica Tolerates f failures with 2f+1 replicas

Waiting on all replicas means we can make progress as long as at least one replica is available. With quorum, tolerating the same amount of failures requires more replicas because we need a majority to make progress. The trade-off is that the quorum hides any delays from a slow replica. Kafka is an example of a system which uses all replicas (with some conditions on this which we will see later), and NATS Streaming is one that uses a quorum. Let’s take a look at both in more detail.

Replication in Kafka

In Kafka, a leader is selected (we’ll touch on this in a moment). This leader maintains an in-sync replica set (ISR) consisting of all the replicas which are fully caught up with the leader. This is every replica, by definition, at the beginning. All reads and writes go through the leader. The leader writes messages to a write-ahead log (WAL). Messages written to the WAL are considered uncommitted or “dirty” initially. The leader only commits a message once all replicas in the ISR have written it to their own WAL. The leader also maintains a high-water mark (HW) which is the last committed message in the WAL. This gets piggybacked on the replica fetch responses from which replicas periodically checkpoint to disk for recovery purposes. The piggybacked HW then allows replicas to know when to commit.

Only committed messages are exposed to consumers. However, producers can configure how they want to receive acknowledgements on writes. It can wait until the message is committed on the leader (and thus replicated to the ISR), wait for the message to only be written (but not committed) to the leader’s WAL, or not wait at all. This all depends on what trade-offs the producer wants to make between latency and durability.

The graphic below shows how this replication process works for a cluster of three brokers: b1, b2, and b3. Followers are effectively special consumers of the leader’s log.

Now let’s look at a few failure modes and how Kafka handles them.

Leader Fails

Kafka relies on Apache ZooKeeper for certain cluster coordination tasks, such as leader election, though this is not actually how the log leader is elected. A Kafka cluster has a single controller broker whose election is handled by ZooKeeper. This controller is responsible for performing administrative tasks on the cluster. One of these tasks is selecting a new log leader (actually partition leader, but this will be described later in the series) from the ISR when the current leader dies. ZooKeeper is also used to detect these broker failures and signal them to the controller.

Thus, when the leader crashes, the cluster controller is notified by ZooKeeper and it selects a new leader from the ISR and announces this to the followers. This gives us automatic failover of the leader. All committed messages up to the HW are preserved and uncommitted messages may be lost during the failover. In this case, b1 fails and b2 steps up as leader.

Follower Fails

The leader tracks information on how “caught up” each replica is. Before Kafka 0.9, this included both how many messages a replica was behind, replica.lag.max.messages, and the amount of time since the replica last fetched messages from the leader, replica.lag.time.max.ms. Since 0.9, replica.lag.max.messages was removed and replica.lag.time.max.ms now refers to both the time since the last fetch request and the amount of time since the replica last caught up.

Thus, when a follower fails (or stops fetching messages for whatever reason), the leader will detect this based on replica.lag.time.max.ms. After that time expires, the leader will consider the replica out of sync and remove it from the ISR. In this scenario, the cluster enters an “under-replicated” state since the ISR has shrunk. Specifically, b2 fails and is removed from the ISR.

Follower Temporarily Partitioned

The case of a follower being temporarily partitioned, e.g. due to a transient network failure, is handled in a similar fashion to the follower itself failing. These two failure modes can really be combined since the latter is just the former with an arbitrarily long partition, i.e. it’s the difference between crash-stop and crash-recovery models.

In this case, b3 is partitioned from the leader. As before, replica.lag.time.max.ms acts as our failure detector and causes b3 to be removed from the ISR. We enter an under-replicated state and the remaining two brokers continue committing messages 4 and 5. Accordingly, the HW is updated to 5 on these brokers.

When the partition heals, b3 continues reading from the leader and catching up. Once it is fully caught up with the leader, it’s added back into the ISR and the cluster resumes its fully replicated state.

We can generalize this to the crash-recovery model. For example, instead of a network partition, the follower could crash and be restarted later. When the failed replica is restarted, it recovers the HW from disk and truncates its log up to the HW. This preserves the invariant that messages after the HW are not guaranteed to be committed. At this point, it can begin catching up from the leader and will end up with a log consistent with the leader’s once fully caught up.

Replication in NATS Streaming

NATS Streaming relies on the Raft consensus algorithm for leader election and data replication. This sometimes comes as a surprise to some as Raft is largely seen as a protocol for replicated state machines. We’ll try to understand why Raft was chosen for this particular problem in the following sections. We won’t dive deep into Raft itself beyond what is needed for the purposes of this discussion.

While a log is a state machine, it’s a very simple one: a series of appends. Raft is frequently used as the replication mechanism for key-value stores which have a clearer notion of “state machine.” For example, with a key-value store, we have set and delete operations. If we set foo = bar and then later set foo = baz, the state gets rolled up. That is, we don’t necessarily care about the provenance of the key, only its current state.

However, NATS Streaming differs from Kafka in a number of key ways. One of these differences is that NATS Streaming attempts to provide a sort of unified API for streaming and queueing semantics not too dissimilar from Apache Pulsar. This means, while it has a notion of a log, it also has subscriptions on that log. Unlike Kafka, NATS Streaming tracks these subscriptions and metadata associated with them, such as where a client is in the log. These have definite “state machines” affiliated with them, like creating and deleting subscriptions, positions in the log, clients joining or leaving queue groups, and message-redelivery information.

Currently, NATS Streaming uses multiple Raft groups for replication. There is a single metadata Raft group used for replicating client state and there is a separate Raft group per topic which replicates messages and subscriptions.

Raft solves both the problems of leader election and data replication in a single protocol. The Secret Lives of Data provides an excellent interactive illustration of how this works. As you step through that illustration, you’ll notice that the algorithm is actually quite similar to the Kafka replication protocol we walked through earlier. This is because although Raft is used to implement replicated state machines, it actually is a replicated WAL, which is exactly what Kafka is. One benefit of using Raft is we no longer have the need for ZooKeeper or some other coordination service.

Raft handles electing a leader. Heartbeats are used to maintain leadership. Writes flow through the leader to the followers. The leader appends writes to its WAL and they are subsequently piggybacked onto the heartbeats which get sent to the followers using AppendEntries messages. At this point, the followers append the write to their own WALs, assuming they don’t detect a gap, and send a response back to the leader. The leader commits the write once it receives a successful response from a quorum of followers.

Similar to Kafka, each replica in Raft maintains a high-water mark of sorts called the commit index, which is the index of the highest log entry known to be committed. This is piggybacked on the AppendEntries messages which the followers use to know when to commit entries in their WALs. If a follower detects that it missed an entry (i.e. there was a gap in the log), it rejects the AppendEntries and informs the leader to rewind the replication. The Raft paper details how it ensures correctness, even in the face of many failure modes such as the ones described earlier.

Conceptually, there are two logs: the Raft log and the NATS Streaming message log. The Raft log handles replicating messages and, once committed, they are appended to the NATS Streaming log. If it seems like there’s some redundancy here, that’s because there is, which we’ll get to soon. However, keep in mind we’re not just replicating the message log, but also the state machines associated with the log and any clients.

There are a few challenges with this replication technique, two of which we will talk about. The first is scaling Raft. With a single topic, there is one Raft group, which means one node is elected leader and it heartbeats messages to followers.

As the number of topics increases, so do the number of Raft groups, each with their own leaders and heartbeats. Unless we constrain the Raft group participants or the number of topics, this creates an explosion of network traffic between nodes.

There are a couple ways we can go about addressing this. One option is to run a fixed number of Raft groups and use a consistent hash to map a topic to a group. This can work well if we know roughly the number of topics beforehand since we can size the number of Raft groups accordingly. If you expect only 10 topics, running 10 Raft groups is probably reasonable. But if you expect 10,000 topics, you probably don’t want 10,000 Raft groups. If hashing is consistent, it would be feasible to dynamically add or remove Raft groups at runtime, but it would still require repartitioning a portion of topics which can be complicated.

Another option is to run an entire node’s worth of topics as a single group using a layer on top of Raft. This is what CockroachDB does to scale Raft in proportion to the number of key ranges using a layer on top of Raft they call MultiRaft. This requires some cooperation from the Raft implementation, so it’s a bit more involved than the partitioning technique but eschews the repartitioning problem and redundant heartbeating.

The second challenge with using Raft for this problem is the issue of “dual writes.” As mentioned before, there are really two logs: the Raft log and the NATS Streaming message log, which we’ll call the “store.” When a message is published, the leader writes it to its Raft log and it goes through the Raft replication process.

Once the message is committed in Raft, it’s written to the NATS Streaming log and the message is now visible to consumers.

Note, however, that not only messages are written to the Raft log. We also have subscriptions and cluster topology changes, for instance. These other items are not written to the NATS Streaming log but handled in other ways on commit. That said, messages tend to occur in much greater volume than these other entries.

Messages end up getting stored redundantly, once in the Raft log and once in the NATS Streaming log. We can address this problem if we think about our logs a bit differently. If you recall from part one, our log storage consists of two parts: the log segment and the log index. The segment stores the actual log data, and the index stores a mapping from log offset to position in the segment.

Along these lines, we can think of the Raft log index as a “physical offset” and the NATS Streaming log index as a “logical offset.” Instead of maintaining two logs, we treat the Raft log as our message write-ahead log and treat the NATS Streaming log as an index into that WAL. Particularly, messages are written to the Raft log as usual. Once committed, we write an index entry for the message offset that points back into the log. As before, we use the index to do lookups into the log and can then read sequentially from the log itself.

Remaining Questions

We’ve answered the questions of how to ensure continuity of reads and writes, how to replicate data, and how to ensure replicas are consistent. The remaining two questions pertaining to replication are how do we keep things fast and how do we ensure data is durable?

There are several things we can do with respect to performance. The first is we can configure publisher acks depending on our application’s requirements. Specifically, we have three options. The first is the broker acks on commit. This is slow but safe as it guarantees the data is replicated. The second is the broker acks on appending to its local log. This is fast but unsafe since it doesn’t wait on any replica roundtrips but, by that very fact, means that the data is not replicated. If the leader crashes, the message could be lost. Lastly, the publisher can just not wait for an ack at all. This is the fastest but least safe option for obvious reasons. Tuning this all depends on what requirements and trade-offs make sense for your application.

The second thing we do is don’t explicitly fsync writes on the broker and instead rely on replication for durability. Both Kafka and NATS Streaming (when clustered) do this. With fsync enabled (in Kafka, this is configured with flush.messages and/or flush.ms and in NATS Streaming, with file_sync), every message that gets published results in a sync to disk. This ends up being very expensive. The thought here is if we are replicating to enough nodes, the replication itself is sufficient for HA of data since the likelihood of more than a quorum of nodes failing is low, especially if we are using rack-aware clustering. Note that data is still periodically flushed in the background by the kernel.

Batching aggressively is also a key part of ensuring good performance. Kafka supports end-to-end batching from the producer all the way to the consumer. NATS Streaming does not currently support batching at the API level, but it uses aggressive batching when replicating and persisting messages. In my experience, this makes about an order-of-magnitude improvement in throughput.

Finally, as already discussed earlier in the series, keeping disk access sequential and maximizing zero-copy reads makes a big difference as well.

There are a few things worth noting with respect to durability. Quorum is what guarantees durability of data. This comes “for free” with Raft due to the nature of that protocol. In Kafka, we need to do a bit of configuring to ensure this. Namely, we need to configure min.insync.replicas on the broker and acks on the producer. The former controls the minimum number of replicas that must acknowledge a write for it to be considered successful when a producer sets acks to “all.” The latter controls the number of acknowledgments the producer requires the leader to have received before considering a request complete. For example, with a topic that has a replication factor of three, min.insync.replicas needs to be set to two and acks set to “all.” This will, in effect, require a quorum of two replicas to process writes.

Another caveat with Kafka is unclean leader elections. That is, if all replicas become unavailable, there are two options: choose the first replica to come back to life (not necessarily in the ISR) and elect this replica as leader (which could result in data loss) or wait for a replica in the ISR to come back to life and elect it as leader (which could result in prolonged unavailability). Initially, Kafka favored availability by default by choosing the first strategy. If you preferred consistency, you needed to set unclean.leader.election.enable to false. However, as of 0.11, unclean.leader.election.enable now defaults to this.

Fundamentally, durability and consistency are at odds with availability. If there is no quorum, then no reads or writes can be accepted and the cluster is unavailable. This is the crux of the CAP theorem.

In part three of this series, we will discuss scaling message delivery in the distributed log.

From the Ground Up: Reasoning About Distributed Systems in the Real World

The rabbit hole is deep. Down and down it goes. Where it ends, nobody knows. But as we traverse it, patterns appear. They give us hope, they quell the fear.

Distributed systems literature is abundant, but as a practitioner, I often find it difficult to know where to start or how to synthesize this knowledge without a more formal background. This is a non-academic’s attempt to provide a line of thought for rationalizing design decisions. This piece doesn’t necessarily contribute any new ideas but rather tries to provide a holistic framework by studying some influential existing ones. It includes references which provide a good starting point for thinking about distributed systems. Specifically, we look at a few formal results and slightly less formal design principles to provide a basis from which we can argue about system design.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. I wish I could say there is no red-pill/blue-pill scenario at play here, but the world of distributed systems is complex. In order to make sense of it, we reason from the ground up while simultaneously stumbling down the deep and cavernous rabbit hole.

Guiding Principles

In order to reason about distributed system design, it’s important to lay out some guiding principles or theorems used to establish an argument. Perhaps the most fundamental of which is the Two Generals Problem originally introduced by Akkoyunlu et al. in Some Constraints and Trade-offs in the Design of Network Communications and popularized by Jim Gray in Notes on Data Base Operating Systems in 1975 and 1978, respectively. The Two Generals Problem demonstrates that it’s impossible for two processes to agree on a decision over an unreliable network. It’s closely related to the binary consensus problem (“attack” or “don’t attack”) where the following conditions must hold:

  • Termination: all correct processes decide some value (liveness property).
  • Validity: if all correct processes decide v, then v must have been proposed by some correct process (non-triviality property).
  • Integrity: all correct processes decide at most one value v, and is the “right” value (safety property).
  • Agreement: all correct processes must agree on the same value (safety property).

It becomes quickly apparent that any useful distributed algorithm consists of some intersection of both liveness and safety properties. The problem becomes more complicated when we consider an asynchronous network with crash failures:

  • Asynchronous: messages may be delayed arbitrarily long but will eventually be delivered.
  • Crash failure: processes can halt indefinitely.

Considering this environment actually leads us to what is arguably one of the most important results in distributed systems theory: the FLP impossibility result introduced by Fischer, Lynch, and Patterson in their 1985 paper Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process. This result shows that the Two Generals Problem is provably impossible. When we do not consider an upper bound on the time a process takes to complete its work and respond in a crash-failure model, it’s impossible to make the distinction between a process that is crashed and one that is taking a long time to respond. FLP shows there is no algorithm which deterministically solves the consensus problem in an asynchronous environment when it’s possible for at least one process to crash. Equivalently, we say it’s impossible to have a perfect failure detector in an asynchronous system with crash failures.

When talking about fault-tolerant systems, it’s also important to consider Byzantine faults, which are essentially arbitrary faults. These include, but are not limited to, attacks which might try to subvert the system. For example, a security attack might try to generate or falsify messages. The Byzantine Generals Problem is a generalized version of the Two Generals Problem which describes this fault model. Byzantine fault tolerance attempts to protect against these threats by detecting or masking a bounded number of Byzantine faults.

Why do we care about consensus? The reason is it’s central to so many important problems in system design. Leader election implements consensus allowing you to dynamically promote a coordinator to avoid single points of failure. Distributed databases implement consensus to ensure data consistency across nodes. Message queues implement consensus to provide transactional or ordered delivery. Distributed init systems implement consensus to coordinate processes. Consensus is fundamentally an important problem in distributed programming.

It has been shown time and time again that networks, whether local-area or wide-area, are often unreliable and largely asynchronous. As a result, these proofs impose real and significant challenges to system design.

The implications of these results are not simply academic: these impossibility results have motivated a proliferation of systems and designs offering a range of alternative guarantees in the event of network failures.

L. Peter Deutsch’s fallacies of distributed computing are a key jumping-off point in the theory of distributed systems. It presents a set of incorrect assumptions which many new to the space frequently make, of which the first is “the network is reliable.”

  1. The network is reliable.
  2. Latency is zero.
  3. Bandwidth is infinite.
  4. The network is secure.
  5. Topology doesn’t change.
  6. There is one administrator.
  7. Transport cost is zero.
  8. The network is homogeneous.

The CAP theorem, while recently the subject of scrutiny and debate over whether it’s overstated or not, is a useful tool for establishing fundamental trade-offs in distributed systems and detecting vendor sleight of hand. Gilbert and Lynch’s Perspectives on the CAP Theorem lays out the intrinsic trade-off between safety and liveness in a fault-prone system, while Fox and Brewer’s Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems characterizes it in a more pragmatic light. I will continue to say unequivocally that the CAP theorem is important within the field of distributed systems and of significance to system designers and practitioners.

A Renewed Hope

Following from the results detailed earlier would imply many distributed algorithms, including those which implement linearizable operations, serializable transactions, and leader election, are a hopeless endeavor. Is it game over? Fortunately, no. Carefully designed distributed systems can maintain correctness without relying on pure coincidence.

First, it’s important to point out that the FLP result does not indicate consensus is unreachable, just that it’s not always reachable in bounded time. Second, the system model FLP uses is, in some ways, a pathological one. Synchronous systems place a known upper bound on message delivery between processes and on process computation. Asynchronous systems have no fixed upper bounds. In practice, systems tend to exhibit partial synchrony, which is described as one of two models by Dwork and Lynch in Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony. In the first model of partial synchrony, fixed bounds exist but they are not known a priori. In the second model, the bounds are known but are only guaranteed to hold starting at unknown time T. Dwork and Lynch present fault-tolerant consensus protocols for both partial-synchrony models combined with various fault models.

Chandra and Toueg introduce the concept of unreliable failure detectors in Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. Each process has a local, external failure detector which can make mistakes. The detector monitors a subset of the processes in the system and maintains a list of those it suspects to have crashed. Failures are detected by simply pinging each process periodically and suspecting any process which doesn’t respond to the ping within twice the maximum round-trip time for any previous ping. The detector makes a mistake when it erroneously suspects a correct process, but it may later correct the mistake by removing the process from its list of suspects. The presence of failure detectors, even unreliable ones, makes consensus solvable in a slightly relaxed system model.

While consensus ensures processes agree on a value, atomic broadcast ensures processes deliver the same messages in the same order. This same paper shows that the problems of consensus and atomic broadcast are reducible to each other, meaning they are equivalent. Thus, the FLP result and others apply equally to atomic broadcast, which is used in coordination services like Apache ZooKeeper.

In Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming, Cachin, Guerraoui, and Rodrigues suggest most practical systems can be described as partially synchronous:

Generally, distributed systems appear to be synchronous. More precisely, for most systems that we know of, it is relatively easy to define physical time bounds that are respected most of the time. There are, however, periods where the timing assumptions do not hold, i.e., periods during which the system is asynchronous. These are periods where the network is overloaded, for instance, or some process has a shortage of memory that slows it down. Typically, the buffer that a process uses to store incoming and outgoing messages may overflow, and messages may thus get lost, violating the time bound on the delivery. The retransmission of the messages may help ensure the reliability of the communication links but introduce unpredictable delays. In this sense, practical systems are partially synchronous.

We capture partial synchrony by assuming timing assumptions only hold eventually without stating exactly when. Similarly, we call the system eventually synchronous. However, this does not guarantee the system is synchronous forever after a certain time, nor does it require the system to be initially asynchronous then after a period of time become synchronous. Instead it implies the system has periods of asynchrony which are not bounded, but there are periods where the system is synchronous long enough for an algorithm to do something useful or terminate. The key thing to remember with asynchronous systems is that they contain no timing assumptions.

Lastly, On the Minimal Synchronism Needed for Distributed Consensus by Dolev, Dwork, and Stockmeyer describes a consensus protocol as t-resilient if it operates correctly when at most t processes fail. In the paper, several critical system parameters and synchronicity conditions are identified, and it’s shown how varying them affects the t-resiliency of an algorithm. Consensus is shown to be provably possible for some models and impossible for others.

Fault-tolerant consensus is made possible by relying on quorums. The intuition is that as long as a majority of processes agree on every decision, there is at least one process which knows about the complete history in the presence of faults.

Deterministic consensus, and by extension a number of other useful algorithms, is impossible in certain system models, but we can model most real-world systems in a way that circumvents this. Nevertheless, it shows the inherent complexities involved with distributed systems and the rigor needed to solve certain problems.

Theory to Practice

What does all of this mean for us in practice? For starters, it means distributed systems are usually a harder problem than they let on. Unfortunately, this is often the cause of improperly documented trade-offs or, in many cases, data loss and safety violations. It also suggests we need to rethink the way we design systems by shifting the focus from system properties and guarantees to business rules and application invariants.

One of my favorite papers is End-To-End Arguments in System Design by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark. It’s an easy read, but it presents a compelling design principle for determining where to place functionality in a distributed system. The principle idea behind the end-to-end argument is that functions placed at a low level in a system may be redundant or of little value when compared to the cost of providing them at that low level. It follows that, in many situations, it makes more sense to flip guarantees “inside out”—pushing them outwards rather than relying on subsystems, middleware, or low-level layers of the stack to maintain them.

To illustrate this, we consider the problem of “careful file transfer.” A file is stored by a file system on the disk of computer A, which is linked by a communication network to computer B. The goal is to move the file from computer A’s storage to computer B’s storage without damage and in the face of various failures along the way. The application in this case is the file-transfer program which relies on storage and network abstractions. We can enumerate just a few of the potential problems an application designer might be concerned with:

  1. The file, though originally written correctly onto the disk at host A, if read now may contain incorrect data, perhaps because of hardware faults in the disk storage system.
  2. The software of the file system, the file transfer program, or the data communication system might make a mistake in buffering and copying the data of the file, either at host A or host B.
  3. The hardware processor or its local memory might have a transient error while doing the buffering and copying, either at host A or host B.
  4. The communication system might drop or change the bits in a packet, or lose a packet or deliver a packet more than once.
  5. Either of the hosts may crash part way through the transaction after performing an unknown amount (perhaps all) of the transaction.

Many of these problems are Byzantine in nature. When we consider each threat one by one, it becomes abundantly clear that even if we place countermeasures in the low-level subsystems, there will still be checks required in the high-level application. For example, we might place checksums, retries, and sequencing of packets in the communication system to provide reliable data transmission, but this really only eliminates threat four. An end-to-end checksum and retry mechanism at the file-transfer level is needed to guard against the remaining threats.

Building reliability into the low level has a number of costs involved. It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to build it. It’s redundant and, in fact, hinders performance by reducing the frequency of application retries and adding unneeded overhead. It also has no actual effect on correctness because correctness is determined and enforced by the end-to-end checksum and retries. The reliability and correctness of the communication system is of little importance, so going out of its way to ensure resiliency does not reduce any burden on the application. In fact, ensuring correctness by relying on the low level might be altogether impossible since threat number two requires writing correct programs, but not all programs involved may be written by the file-transfer application programmer.

Fundamentally, there are two problems with placing functionality at the lower level. First, the lower level is not aware of the application needs or semantics, which means logic placed there is often insufficient. This leads to duplication of logic as seen in the example earlier. Second, other applications which rely on the lower level pay the cost of the added functionality even when they don’t necessarily need it.

Saltzer, Reed, and Clark propose the end-to-end principle as a sort of “Occam’s razor” for system design, arguing that it helps guide the placement of functionality and organization of layers in a system.

Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.

However, it’s important to note that the end-to-end principle is not a panacea. Rather, it’s a guideline to help get designers to think about their solutions end to end, acknowledge their application requirements, and consider their failure modes. Ultimately, it provides a rationale for moving function upward in a layered system, closer to the application that uses the function, but there are always exceptions to the rule. Low-level mechanisms might be built as a performance optimization. Regardless, the end-to-end argument contends that lower levels should avoid taking on any more responsibility than necessary. The “lessons” section from Google’s Bigtable paper echoes some of these same sentiments:

Another lesson we learned is that it is important to delay adding new features until it is clear how the new features will be used. For example, we initially planned to support general-purpose transactions in our API. Because we did not have an immediate use for them, however, we did not implement them. Now that we have many real applications running on Bigtable, we have been able to examine their actual needs, and have discovered that most applications require only single-row transactions. Where people have requested distributed transactions, the most important use is for maintaining secondary indices, and we plan to add a specialized mechanism to satisfy this need. The new mechanism will be less general than distributed transactions, but will be more efficient (especially for updates that span hundreds of rows or more) and will also interact better with our scheme for optimistic cross-datacenter replication.

We’ll see the end-to-end argument as a common theme throughout the remainder of this piece.

Whose Guarantee Is It Anyway?

Generally, we rely on robust algorithms, transaction managers, and coordination services to maintain consistency and application correctness. The problem with these is twofold: they are often unreliable and they impose a massive performance bottleneck.

Distributed coordination algorithms are difficult to get right. Even tried-and-true protocols like two-phase commit are susceptible to crash failures and network partitions. Protocols which are more fault tolerant like Paxos and Raft generally don’t scale well beyond small clusters or across wide-area networks. Consensus systems like ZooKeeper own your availability, meaning if you depend on one and it goes down, you’re up a creek. Since quorums are often kept small for performance reasons, this might be less rare than you think.

Coordination systems become a fragile and complex piece of your infrastructure, which seems ironic considering they are usually employed to reduce fragility. On the other hand, message-oriented middleware largely use coordination to provide developers with strong guarantees: exactly-once, ordered, transactional delivery and the like.

From transmission protocols to enterprise message brokers, relying on delivery guarantees is an anti-pattern in distributed system design. Delivery semantics are a tricky business. As such, when it comes to distributed messaging, what you want is often not what you need. It’s important to look at the trade-offs involved, how they impact system design (and UX!), and how we can cope with them to make better decisions.

Subtle and not-so-subtle failure modes make providing strong guarantees exceedingly difficult. In fact, some guarantees, like exactly-once delivery, aren’t even really possible to achieve when we consider things like the Two Generals Problem and the FLP result. When we try to provide semantics like guaranteed, exactly-once, and ordered message delivery, we usually end up with something that’s over-engineered, difficult to deploy and operate, fragile, and slow. What is the upside to all of this? Something that makes your life easier as a developer when things go perfectly well, but the reality is things don’t go perfectly well most of the time. Instead, you end up getting paged at 1 a.m. trying to figure out why RabbitMQ told your monitoring everything is awesome while proceeding to take a dump in your front yard.

If you have something that relies on these types of guarantees in production, know that this will happen to you at least once sooner or later (and probably much more than that). Eventually, a guarantee is going to break down. It might be inconsequential, it might not. Not only is this a precarious way to go about designing things, but if you operate at a large scale, care about throughput, or have sensitive SLAs, it’s probably a nonstarter.

The performance implications of distributed transactions are obvious. Coordination is expensive because processes can’t make progress independently, which in turn limits throughput, availability, and scalability. Peter Bailis gave an excellent talk called Silence is Golden: Coordination-Avoiding Systems Design which explains this in great detail and how coordination can be avoided. In it, he explains how distributed transactions can result in nearly a 400x decrease in throughput in certain situations.

Avoiding coordination enables infinite scale-out while drastically improving throughput and availability, but in some cases coordination is unavoidable. In Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems, Bailis et al. answer a key question: when is coordination necessary for correctness? They present a property, invariant confluence (I-confluence), which is necessary and sufficient for safe, coordination-free, available, and convergent execution. I-confluence essentially works by pushing invariants up into the business layer where we specify correctness in terms of application semantics rather than low-level database operations.

Without knowledge of what “correctness” means to your app (e.g., the invariants used in I-confluence), the best you can do to preserve correctness under a read/write model is serializability.

I-confluence can be determined given a set of transactions and a merge function used to reconcile divergent states. If I-confluence holds, there exists a coordination-free execution strategy that preserves invariants. If it doesn’t hold, no such strategy exists—coordination is required. I-confluence allows us to identify when we can and can’t give up coordination, and by pushing invariants up, we remove a lot of potential bottlenecks from areas which don’t require it.

If we recall, “synchrony” within the context of distributed computing is really just making assumptions about time, so synchronization is basically two or more processes coordinating around time. As we saw, a system which performs no coordination will have optimal performance and availability since everyone can proceed independently. However, a distributed system which performs zero coordination isn’t particularly useful or possible as I-confluence shows. Christopher Meiklejohn’s Strange Loop talk, Distributed, Eventually Consistent Computations, provides an interesting take on coordination with the parable of the car. A car requires friction to drive, but that friction is limited to very small contact points. Any other friction on the car causes problems or inefficiencies. If we think about physical time as friction, we know we can’t eliminate it altogether because it’s essential to the problem, but we want to reduce the use of it in our systems as much as possible. We can typically avoid relying on physical time by instead using logical time, for example, with the use of Lamport clocks or other conflict-resolution techniques. Lamport’s Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is the classical introduction to this idea.

Often, systems simply forgo coordination altogether for latency-sensitive operations, a perfectly reasonable thing to do provided the trade-off is explicit and well-documented. Sadly, this is frequently not the case. But we can do better. I-confluence provides a useful framework for avoiding coordination, but there’s a seemingly larger lesson to be learned here. What it really advocates is reexamining how we design systems, which seems in some ways to closely parallel our end-to-end argument.

When we think low level, we pay the upfront cost of entry—serializable transactions, linearizable reads and writes, coordination. This seems contradictory to the end-to-end principle. Our application doesn’t really care about atomicity or isolation levels or linearizability. It cares about two users sharing the same ID or two reservations booking the same room or a negative balance in a bank account, but the database doesn’t know that. Sometimes these rules don’t even require any expensive coordination.

If all we do is code our business rules and constraints into the language our infrastructure understands, we end up with a few problems. First, we have to know how to translate our application semantics into these low-level operations while avoiding any impedance mismatch. In the context of messaging, guaranteed delivery doesn’t really mean anything to our application which cares about what’s done with the messages. Second, we preclude ourselves from using a lot of generalized solutions and, in some cases, we end up having to engineer specialized ones ourselves. It’s not clear how well this scales in practice. Third, we pay a performance penalty that could otherwise be avoided (as I-confluence shows). Lastly, we put ourselves at the mercy of our infrastructure and hope it makes good on its promises—it often doesn’t.

Working on a messaging platform team, I’ve had countless conversations which resemble the following exchange:

Developer: “We need fast messaging.”
Me: “Is it okay if messages get dropped occasionally?”
Developer: “What? Of course not! We need it to be reliable.”
Me: “Okay, we’ll add a delivery ack, but what happens if your application crashes before it processes the message?”
Developer: “We’ll ack after processing.”
Me: “What happens if you crash after processing but before acking?”
Developer: “We’ll just retry.”
Me: “So duplicate delivery is okay?”
Developer: “Well, it should really be exactly-once.”
Me: “But you want it to be fast?”
Developer: “Yep. Oh, and it should maintain message ordering.”
Me: “Here’s TCP.”

If, instead, we reevaluate the interactions between our systems, their APIs, their semantics, and move some of that responsibility off of our infrastructure and onto our applications, then maybe we can start to build more robust, resilient, and performant systems. With messaging, does our infrastructure really need to enforce FIFO ordering? Preserving order with distributed messaging in the presence of failure while trying to simultaneously maintain high availability is difficult and expensive. Why rely on it when it can be avoided with commutativity? Likewise, transactional delivery requires coordination which is slow and brittle while still not providing application guarantees. Why rely on it when it can be avoided with idempotence and retries? If you need application-level guarantees, build them into the application level. The infrastructure can’t provide it.

I really like Gregor Hohpe’s “Your Coffee Shop Doesn’t Use Two-Phase Commit” because it shows how simple solutions can be if we just model them off of the real world. It gives me hope we can design better systems, sometimes by just turning things on their head. There’s usually a reason things work the way they do, and it often doesn’t even involve the use of computers or complicated algorithms.

Rather than try to hide complexities by using flaky and heavy abstractions, we should engage directly by recognizing them in our design decisions and thinking end to end. It may be a long and winding path to distributed systems zen, but the best place to start is from the beginning.

I’d like to thank Tom Santero for reviewing an early draft of this writing. Any inaccuracies or opinions expressed are mine alone.

You Cannot Have Exactly-Once Delivery

I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by following in the footsteps of others. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising that folks buy into these fallacies as I once did, but it can be frustrating when trying to communicate certain design decisions and constraints.

Within the context of a distributed system, you cannot have exactly-once message delivery. Web browser and server? Distributed. Server and database? Distributed. Server and message queue? Distributed. You cannot have exactly-once delivery semantics in any of these situations.

As I’ve described in the past, distributed systems are all about trade-offs. This is one of them. There are essentially three types of delivery semantics: at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once. Of the three, the first two are feasible and widely used. If you want to be super anal, you might say at-least-once delivery is also impossible because, technically speaking, network partitions are not strictly time-bound. If the connection from you to the server is interrupted indefinitely, you can’t deliver anything. Practically speaking, you have bigger fish to fry at that point—like calling your ISP—so we consider at-least-once delivery, for all intents and purposes, possible. With this model of thinking, network partitions are finitely bounded in time, however arbitrary this may be.

So where does the trade-off come into play, and why is exactly-once delivery impossible? The answer lies in the Two Generals thought experiment or the more generalized Byzantine Generals Problem, which I’ve looked at extensively. We must also consider the FLP result, which basically says, given the possibility of a faulty process, it’s impossible for a system of processes to agree on a decision.

In the letter I mail you, I ask you to call me once you receive it. You never do. Either you really didn’t care for my letter or it got lost in the mail. That’s the cost of doing business. I can send the one letter and hope you get it, or I can send 10 letters and assume you’ll get at least one of them. The trade-off here is quite clear (postage is expensive!), but sending 10 letters doesn’t really provide any additional guarantees. In a distributed system, we try to guarantee the delivery of a message by waiting for an acknowledgement that it was received, but all sorts of things can go wrong. Did the message get dropped? Did the ack get dropped? Did the receiver crash? Are they just slow? Is the network slow? Am slow? FLP and the Two Generals Problem are not design complexities, they are impossibility results.

People often bend the meaning of “delivery” in order to make their system fit the semantics of exactly-once, or in other cases, the term is overloaded to mean something entirely different. State-machine replication is a good example of this. Atomic broadcast protocols ensure messages are delivered reliably and in order. The truth is, we can’t deliver messages reliably and in order in the face of network partitions and crashes without a high degree of coordination. This coordination, of course, comes at a cost (latency and availability), while still relying on at-least-once semantics. Zab, the atomic broadcast protocol which lays the foundation for ZooKeeper, enforces idempotent operations.

State changes are idempotent and applying the same state change multiple times does not lead to inconsistencies as long as the application order is consistent with the delivery order. Consequently, guaranteeing at-least once semantics is sufficient and simplifies the implementation.

“Simplifies the implementation” is the authors’ attempt at subtlety. State-machine replication is just that, replicating state. If our messages have side effects, all of this goes out the window.

We’re left with a few options, all equally tenuous. When a message is delivered, it’s acknowledged immediately before processing. The sender receives the ack and calls it a day. However, if the receiver crashes before or during its processing, that data is lost forever. Customer transaction? Sorry, looks like you’re not getting your order. This is the worldview of at-most-once delivery. To be honest, implementing at-most-once semantics is more complicated than this depending on the situation. If there are multiple workers processing tasks or the work queues are replicated, the broker must be strongly consistent (or CP in CAP theorem parlance) so as to ensure a task is not delivered to any other workers once it’s been acked. Apache Kafka uses ZooKeeper to handle this coordination.

On the other hand, we can acknowledge messages after they are processed. If the process crashes after handling a message but before acking (or the ack isn’t delivered), the sender will redeliver. Hello, at-least-once delivery. Furthermore, if you want to deliver messages in order to more than one site, you need an atomic broadcast which is a huge burden on throughput. Fast or consistent. Welcome to the world of distributed systems.

Every major message queue in existence which provides any guarantees will market itself as at-least-once delivery. If it claims exactly-once, it’s because they are lying to your face in hopes that you will buy it or they themselves do not understand distributed systems. Either way, it’s not a good indicator.

RabbitMQ attempts to provide guarantees along these lines:

When using confirms, producers recovering from a channel or connection failure should retransmit any messages for which an acknowledgement has not been received from the broker. There is a possibility of message duplication here, because the broker might have sent a confirmation that never reached the producer (due to network failures, etc). Therefore consumer applications will need to perform deduplication or handle incoming messages in an idempotent manner.

The way we achieve exactly-once delivery in practice is by faking it. Either the messages themselves should be idempotent, meaning they can be applied more than once without adverse effects, or we remove the need for idempotency through deduplication. Ideally, our messages don’t require strict ordering and are commutative instead. There are design implications and trade-offs involved with whichever route you take, but this is the reality in which we must live.

Rethinking operations as idempotent actions might be easier said than done, but it mostly requires a change in the way we think about state. This is best described by revisiting the replicated state machine. Rather than distributing operations to apply at various nodes, what if we just distribute the state changes themselves? Rather than mutating state, let’s just report facts at various points in time. This is effectively how Zab works.

Imagine we want to tell a friend to come pick us up. We send him a series of text messages with turn-by-turn directions, but one of the messages is delivered twice! Our friend isn’t too happy when he finds himself in the bad part of town. Instead, let’s just tell him where we are and let him figure it out. If the message gets delivered more than once, it won’t matter. The implications are wider reaching than this, since we’re still concerned with the ordering of messages, which is why solutions like commutative and convergent replicated data types are becoming more popular. That said, we can typically solve this problem through extrinsic means like sequencing, vector clocks, or other partial-ordering mechanisms. It’s usually causal ordering that we’re after anyway. People who say otherwise don’t quite realize that there is no now in a distributed system.

To reiterate, there is no such thing as exactly-once delivery. We must choose between the lesser of two evils, which is at-least-once delivery in most cases. This can be used to simulate exactly-once semantics by ensuring idempotency or otherwise eliminating side effects from operations. Once again, it’s important to understand the trade-offs involved when designing distributed systems. There is asynchrony abound, which means you cannot expect synchronous, guaranteed behavior. Design for failure and resiliency against this asynchronous nature.

From Mainframe to Microservice: An Introduction to Distributed Systems

I gave a talk at Iowa Code Camp this weekend on distributed systems. It was primarily an introduction to them, so it explored some core concepts at a high level.  We looked at why distributed systems are difficult to build (right), the CAP theorem, consensus, scaling shared data and CRDTs.

There was some interest in making the slides available online. I’m not sure how useful they are without narration, but here they are anyway for posterity.

Understanding Consensus

A classical problem presented within the field of distributed systems is the Byzantine Generals Problem. In it, we observe two allied armies positioned on either side of a valley. Within the valley is a fortified city. Each army has a general with one acting as commander. Both armies must attack at the same time or face defeat by the city’s defenders. In order to come to an agreement on when to attack, messengers must be sent through the valley, risking capture by the city’s patrols. Consider the diagram below illustrating this problem.

byzantine_generals

In the above scenario, Army A has sent a messenger to Army B with a message saying “Attack at 0700.” Army B receives this message and dispatches a messenger carrying an acknowledgement of the attack plans; however, our ill-fated messenger has been intercepted by the city’s defenders.

How do our armies come to an agreement on when to attack? Perhaps Army A sends 100 messengers and attacks regardless. Unfortunately, if all of the messengers are captured, this would result in a swift defeat because A would attack without B. What if, instead, A sends 100 messengers, waits for acknowledgements of those messages, and only attacks if it reaches a certain level of confidence, say receiving 75 or more confirmations? Yet again, this could very well end in defeat, this time with B attacking without A.

We also need to bear in mind that sending messages has a certain amount of overhead. We can’t, in good conscience, send a million messengers to their potential demise. Or maybe we can, but it’s more than the number of soldiers in our army.

In fact, we can’t reliably make a decision. It’s provenly impossible. In the face of a Byzantine failure, it becomes even more complicated by the possibility of traitors or forged messages.

Now replace two generals with N generals. Coming to a perfectly reliable agreement between two generals was already impossible but becomes dramatically more complicated. It’s a problem more commonly referred to as distributed consensus, and it’s the focus of an army of researchers.

The problem of consensus is blissfully simple, but the solution is far from trivial. Consensus is the basis of distributed coordination services, locking protocols, and databases. A monolithic system (think a MySQL server) can enforce ACID constraints with consistent reads but exhibits generally poor availability and fault tolerance. The original Google App Engine datastore relied on a master/slave architecture where a single data center held the primary copy of data which was replicated to backup sites asynchronously. This offered applications strong consistency and low latency with the implied trade-off of availability. The health of an application was directly tied to the health of a data center. Beyond transient losses, it also meant periods of planned unavailability and read-only access while Google performed data center maintenance. App Engine has since transitioned to a high-replication datastore which relies on distributed consensus to replicate data across sites. This allows the datastore to continue operating in the presence of failures and at greater availability. In agreement with CAP, this naturally means higher latency on writes.

There are a number of solutions to distributed consensus, but most of them tend to be pretty characteristic of each other. We will look at some of these solutions, including multi-phase commit and state-replication approaches.

Two-Phase Commit

Two-phase commit (2PC) is the simplest multi-phase commit protocol. In two-phase commit, all transactions go through a coordinator who is responsible for ensuring a transaction occurs across one or more remote sites (cohorts).

2pc

When the coordinator receives a request, it asks each of its cohorts to vote yes or no. During this phase, each cohort performs the transaction up to the point of committing it. The coordinator then waits for all votes. If the vote is unanimously “yes,” it sends a message to its cohorts to commit the transaction. If one or more vote is “no,” a message is sent to rollback. The cohorts then acknowledge whether the transaction was committed or rolled back and the process is complete.

Two-phase commit is a blocking protocol. The coordinator blocks waiting for votes from its cohorts, and cohorts block waiting for a commit/rollback message from the coordinator. Unfortunately, this means 2PC can, in some circumstances, result in a deadlock, e.g. the coordinator dies while cohorts wait or a cohort dies while the coordinator waits. Another problematic scenario is when a coordinator and cohort simultaneously fail. Even if another coordinator takes its place, it won’t be able to determine whether to commit or rollback.

Three-Phase Commit

Three-phase commit (3PC) is designed to solve the problems identified in two-phase by implementing a non-blocking protocol with an added “prepare” phase. Like 2PC, it relies on a coordinator which relays messages to its cohorts.

3pc

Unlike 2PC, cohorts do not execute a transaction during the voting phase. Rather, they simply indicate if they are prepared to perform the transaction. If cohorts timeout during this phase or there is one or more “no” vote, the transaction is aborted. If the vote is unanimously “yes,” the coordinator moves on to the “prepare” phase, sending a message to its cohorts to acknowledge the transaction will be committed. Again, if an ack times out, the transaction is aborted. Once all cohorts have acknowledged the commit, we are guaranteed to be in a state where all cohorts have agreed to commit. At this point, if the commit message from the coordinator is not received in the third phase, the cohort will go ahead and commit anyway. This solves the deadlocking problems described earlier. However, 3PC is still susceptible to network partitions. If a partition occurs, the coordinator will timeout and progress will not be made.

State Replication

Protocols like Raft, Paxos, and Zab are popular and widely used solutions to the problem of distributed consensus. These implement state replication or primary-backup using leaders, quorums, and replicas of operation logs or incremental delta states.

consensus quorum

These protocols work by electing a leader (coordinator). Like multi-phase commit, all changes must go through that leader, who then broadcasts the changes to the group. Changes occur by appending a log entry, and each node has its own log replica. Where multi-phase commit falls down in the face of network partitions, these protocols are able to continue working by relying on a quorum (majority). The leader commits the change once the quorum has acknowledged it.

The use of quorums provide partition tolerance by fencing minority partitions while the majority continues to operate. This is the pessimistic approach to solving split-brain, so it comes with an inherent availability trade-off. This problem is mitigated by the fact that each node hosts a replicated state machine which can be rebuilt or reconciled once the partition is healed.

Google relies on Paxos for its high-replication datastore in App Engine as well as its Chubby lock service. The distributed key-value store etcd uses Raft to manage highly available replicated logs. Zab, which differentiates itself from the former by implementing a primary-backup protocol, was designed for the ZooKeeper coordination service. In general, there are several different implementations of these protocols, such as the Go implementation of Raft.

Distributed consensus is a difficult thing to get right, but it’s important to frame it within the context of CAP. We can ensure stronger consistency at the cost of higher latency and lower availability. On the other hand, we can achieve higher availability with decreased latency while giving up strong consistency. The trade-offs really depend on what your needs are.