Replicating modifiable data is a challenge in large-scale distributed systems, as it suffers from a fundamental tension between availability and data consistency. Eventual consistency sidesteps the problem of availability under network partitioning, but remains ad-hoc, error-prone, and difficult to apply for programmers.
In this talk, we will introduce a new approach to shared, mutable and
replicated data: conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs).
Complying to simple mathematical properties (namely commutativity of concurrent
updates, or inflations of object states in a semi-lattice), any CRDT provably
converges, provided all replicas eventually receive all operations.
A CRDT requires no synchronization: an update can
execute immediately, irrespective of network latency, faults, or
disconnection; it is highly scalable and fault-tolerant.
In this tutorial, we will explain and justify the theoretical foundation of CRDTs and see how they are integrated and used in Riak 2.0.
Participants should install Riak 2.0 - instructions are here.
Moreover, participants should install riak_playground from
here.
Annette Bieniusa is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Kaiserslautern. She received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg in 2011 and spent one year as postdoctoral researcher at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt.
Her research interests include semantics of concurrent and distributed programming, with a focus on replication, synchronization, and programming language concepts such as Software Transactional Memory and Replicated Data Structures.
Annette was involved in several national and international research projects, and is currently collaborating with Chris Meiklejohn in the EU-Project „SyncFree: Large-scale Computation without Synchronization“.
