Optimistic Causal Consistency for Geo-Replicated Key-Value Stores

Causal consistency (CC) is an attractive consistency model for geo-replicated data stores because it hits a sweet spot in the ease-of-programming versus performance trade-off. We present a new approach for implementing CC in geo-replicated data stores, which we call Optimistic Causal Consistency (OCC). OCC's main design goal is to maximize data freshness. The optimism in our approach lies in the fact that the updates replicated to a remote data center are made visible immediately, without checking if their causal dependencies have been received. Servers perform the dependency check needed to enforce CC only upon serving a client operation, rather than on receipt of a replicated data item as in existing systems. OCC offers a significant gain in data freshness, which is of crucial importance for various types of applications, such as real-time systems. OCC's potentially blocking behavior makes it vulnerable to network partitions. We therefore propose a recovery mechanism that allows an OCC system to fall back on a pessimistic protocol to continue operating during network partitions. We implement POCC, the first causally consistent geo-replicated multi-master key-value data store designed to maximize data freshness. We show that POCC improves data freshness, while offering comparable or better performance than its pessimistic counterparts.