Syndicate: Building a Virtual Cloud Storage Service Through Service Composition

Applications increasingly combine cloud storage, edge caches, and local storage to host and share data. They do so, however, in ad-hoc ways, producing a landscape of point solutions that solve similar problems. This paper describes an alternative approach that composes storage systems in a general, but configurable way. The resulting system, called Syndicate, factors out data consistency, system security, and storage policies in a coherent manner, allowing developers to control these functions independent of the underlying storage. This paper describes Syndicate’s design, and in particular, its novel consistency protocol. It also evaluates a PlanetLab-based deployment of Syndicate, showing that it introduces a small amount of overhead relative to directly using underlying storage mechanisms.