Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated Systems

Distributed deterministic database systems achieve high transaction throughput for geographically replicated data. Supporting transactions with ACID guarantees requires deterministic databases to order transactions globally to dictate execution order. In a geographically distributed environment, ordering transactions globally can take multiple wide-area network (WAN) round trips of messaging, which adds significant latency to transaction response times, leading to poor user experiences. To improve the response time of transactions in deterministic databases, we propose an ordering protocol that can include a transaction in the global order in a single WAN round trip to the primary regions of the data items within the transaction's read and write set. The protocol reduces the cost of determining the global order for all transactions by leveraging deterministic merging of partial sequences of transactions per geographic region. We implement the protocol in Caerus, our geo-replicated deterministic database system that serializably commits and replicates transactions after a delay of only a single WAN round trip of messaging. Using popular workload benchmarks over geographically replicated data in Azure, we show that Caerus outperforms state-of-the-art comparison systems to deliver low-latency transaction execution.