Scalable consistency in Scatter

Abstract

Distributed storage systems often trade off strong semantics for improved scalability. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Scatter, a scalable and consistent distributed key-value storage system. Scatter adopts the highly decentralized and self-organizing structure of scalable peer-to-peer systems, while preserving linearizable consistency even under adverse circumstances. Our prototype implementation demonstrates that even with very short node lifetimes, it is possible to build a scalable and consistent system with practical performance.