Rabia

Introduction

We introduce Rabia, a simple and high performance framework for implementing state-machine replication (SMR) within a datacenter. The main innovation of Rabia is in using randomization to simplify the design. Rabia provides the following two features: (i) It does not need any fail-over protocol and supports trivial auxiliary protocols like log compaction, snapshotting, and reconfiguration, components that are often considered the most challenging when developing SMR systems; and (ii) It provides high performance, up to 1.5x higher throughput than the closest competitor (i.e., EPaxos) in a favorable setup (same availability zone with three replicas) and is comparable with a larger number of replicas or when deployed in multiple availability zones.

Our SOSP paper, "Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization," describes Rabia's design and evaluations in detail (SOSP Artifact Review Summary) and earns three badges: artifact available, artifact evaluated, and artifact reproduced.

Project Keywords:

• state-machine replication (SMR), consensus, and formal verification

CCS Concepts:

• Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks;
• Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms.

Repository structure

• deployment, internal, roles, and main.go: Rabia's implementation in Go and the project's auxiliary code
• proofs: proof scripts for the core weak Multivalued consensus part of the Rabia protocol.
• redis-raft: redis-raft related code and instructions
• epaxos: compiled binaries of Paxos and EPaxos for cloudlab machines from various branches in (E)Paxos and (E)Paxos-NP codebases + scripts to run them
• docs: documentations, see below

Documentations

Paper errata -- Errata of our paper

How to install and run Rabia -- install and run Rabia on a single machine or a cluster of machines

How to read Rabia's codebase -- an introduction to Rabia's implementation

Package-level comments -- contains all Go packages' comments, some design assumptions and rationales, which can be served as an in-depth guide to this codebase.

Rabia's Roadmap and ToDos -- for overarching objectives and and granular items

Developer notes -- contains FAQs and some miscellaneous hints for developers

Main contributors

Lewis Tseng, Joseph Tassarotti, Haochen Pan, Jesse Tuğlu, Neo Zhou, Tianshu Wang, Yicheng Shen, Andrew Chapman and Matthew Abbene -- Boston College

Roberto Palmieri -- Lehigh University

Zheng Xiong -- The University of Texas at Austin