Light-Weight Leases for Storage-Centric Coordination

Abstract

We propose light-weight lease primitives to leverage fault-tolerant coordination among clients accessing a shared storage infrastructure (such as network attached disks or storage servers). In our approach, leases are implemented from the very shared data that they protect. That is, there is no global lease manager, there is a lease per data item (e.g., a file, a directory, a disk partition, etc.) or a collection thereof. Our lease primitives are useful for facillitating exculsive access to data in systems satisfying certain timeliness constraints. In addition, they can be utilized as a building block for implementing dependable services resilient to timing failures. In particular, we show a simple lease based solution for fault-tolerant Consensus which is a benchmark distributed coordination problem.