PyDSM - Reference epaxos implementation for Python3.6

Playing with the epaxos before transferring this to a more high-performing language.

What is done

• A working agreement protocol as described in the paper
• Checkpointing
• Purges of committed instances given that they have been agreed on in the previous version
• Divergence errors - tell a replica we do not accept commands younger than the last checkpoint

TODO

Work in progress diary is in future.md.

• Quorum membership changes

  • Joining of a replica (increase the epoch number, sync the state).
  • Leaving of a replica (by the protocol guarantees that may happen at any time, but we may find a better way to share that).

• Implement Thrifty version of the protocol and a faster version of paxos.

• Implement practical extensions as describen in future.md:

  • Better checkpointing by introducing a sliding window of earliest accepted commands
  • Getting rid of sequential slots as described in the paper and introducing slots that are correlated with request IDs.

Notes

I am interested in implementing a generalised e-paxos based interface which could then be plugged into any state machine in order to make it distributed. This involves:

• Providing a (pluggable) interface to keep track of command dependencies depending on whether the given commands commute.
• Providing a (pluggable) interface to notify of commands pending to be executed after the algorithm has reached consensus.
• Providing a (pluggable) interface to stop and start the state machine after failure or during routine maintenance.

Running

pip install -r requirements.txt
python3.6 dsm_tests/epaxos/zeromq.py

References

Please note the original author of the algorithm has also published a Go version of the algorithm.

Notes

This implementation agrees on 1000 requests per second in a configuration of 5 replicas with an average latency of 2.5ms on local network running on MBP 2014.

AUTHOR:

Andrey Cizov (acizov@gmail.com)