A Highly Available Log Service for Distributed Transaction Processing

Processing distributed transactions hinges on enforcing atomicity and durability: resource man-agers participating in a transaction must agree on its outcome and the transaction updates must bepermanent. We introduce the log service abstraction, which gathers resource managers’ votes tocommit or abort a transaction and their updates, and outputs the transaction’s outcome. Updates aremade durable and non-concurrent transactions are totally ordered by the service. The sequence ofupdates performed by a resource manager is available as a means to consistently recover resourcemanagers without relying on their local state. As a consequence, a remote process, whose state willbe recovered from the log service, can reincarnate a crashed resource manager. Moreover, the serviceensures that only one process plays the role of a given resource manager at any time. We present twohighly available implementations of this service and evaluate their performance running TPC-C anda microbenchmark on a distributed database.