HovercRaft: achieving scalability and fault-tolerance for microsecond-scale datacenter services

Cloud platform services must simultaneously be scalable, meet low tail latency service-level objectives, and be resilient to a combination of software, hardware, and network failures. Replication plays a fundamental role in meeting both the scalability and the fault-tolerance requirement, but is subject to opposing requirements: (1) scalability is typically achieved by relaxing consistency; (2) fault-tolerance is typically achieved through the consistent replication of state machines. Adding nodes to a system can therefore either increase performance at the expense of consistency, or increase resiliency at the expense of performance.

We propose HovercRaft, a new approach by which adding nodes increases both the resilience and the performance of general-purpose state-machine replication. We achieve this through an extension of the Raft protocol that carefully eliminates CPU and I/O bottlenecks and load balances requests.

Our implementation uses state-of-the-art kernel-bypass techniques, datacenter transport protocols, and in-network programmability to deliver up to 1 million operations/second for clusters of up to 9 nodes, linear speedup over unreplicated configuration for selected workloads, and a 4× speedup for the YCSBE-E benchmark running on Redis over an unreplicated deployment.