FlexRaft: Exploiting Flexible Erasure Coding for Minimum-Cost Consensus and Fast Recovery

Consensus protocols like Paxos and Raft provide data consistency and fault tolerance for distributed services. Log replication in these protocols can be supported by erasure coding, which incurs lower redundancy than full-copy replication and significantly saves network and storage costs for overall performance improvements. However, existing consensus protocols with erasure coding cannot achieve the minimum network and storage costs during log replication. We propose FlexRaft, which dynamically varies the coding scheme used in Raft based on the server status to always achieve the theoretically minimum redundancy ratio, while maintaining the same liveness as in Raft. To address the issue of an inconsistent coding scheme between the leader and its followers, we specify the prerequisite of overwriting a log entry and also allow the leader and its followers to exactly track the coding scheme being used. We further extend FlexRaft into FlexRaft+, which provides a different storage layout to vary the coding scheme through a novel technique called re-encoding-free replication, so as to enable fast server recovery. We prove that both FlexRaft and FlexRaft+ maintain Raft safety. We implement a prototype of FlexRaft and FlexRaft+, atop which we build a distributed key-value store to show its efficacy. Experiments on Alibaba Cloud show that FlexRaft achieves the theoretically minimum network and storage costs in practice, and reduces the commit latency by 44.51% and 19.37% compared with state-of-the-art CRaft and HRaft, respectively. FlexRaft+ further reduces the commit latency when the coding scheme is being varied and improves the server recovery performance.