2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '16)

This paper presents that, by combining on-demand instantiation and lazy recovery, we can reduce the cost of asynchronous state machine replication protocols, such as Paxos and UpRight, while maintaining their high availability. To reduce cost, we incorporate on-demand instantiation, which activates a subset of replicas first and activates backup ones when active ones fail. To solve its key limitation—the system can be halted for long when activating a backup replica, we apply lazy recovery, allowing the system to proceed while recovering backup nodes in the background. The key contribution of this paper is to identify that, when agreement nodes and execution nodes are logically separated, they each presents a unique property that enables lazy recovery. We have applied this idea to Paxos and built ThriftyPaxos, which, as shown in the evaluation, can achieve higher throughput and similar availability comparing to standard Paxos, despite the fact that ThriftyPaxos activates fewer replicas.