Title: Okapi: Causally Consistent Geo-Replication Made Faster, Cheaper and More Available,
Abstract: Okapi is a new causally consistent geo-replicated key- value store. Okapi
leverages two key design choices to achieve high performance. First, it relies
on hybrid logical/physical clocks to achieve low latency even in the presence
of clock skew. Second, Okapi achieves higher resource efficiency and better
availability, at the expense of a slight increase in update visibility latency.
To this end, Okapi implements a new stabilization protocol that uses a
combination of vector and scalar clocks and makes a remote update visible when
its delivery has been acknowledged by every data center. We evaluate Okapi with
different workloads on Amazon AWS, using three geographically distributed
regions and 96 nodes. We compare Okapi with two recent approaches to causal
consistency, Cure and GentleRain. We show that Okapi delivers up to two orders
of magnitude better performance than GentleRain and that Okapi achieves up to
3.5x lower latency and a 60% reduction of the meta-data overhead with respect
to Cure.