A Highly Scalable Key-Value Storage System for Latency Sensitive Applications

This paper presents the design of a highly scalable key-value storage system for building latency sensitive applications. To be able to scale up to an extremely large system, the design adopts a decentralized and symmetrical architecture and uses consistent hashing for partitioning. Every node keeps a full membership of all the nodes in the system and can route a lookup in one hop. Server and network failures occur at any time and the storage system is dynamic for nodes join and leave the system continually. We design a hierarchical gossip based membership protocol to capture the accurate membership information of the system with acceptable memory and communication overhead. The system also replicates data items on multiple nodes to achieve high availability and high durability.