Chubby Locking Deep Dive for System Design
Understand the Google Chubby locking service and its role in solving distributed consensus challenges. Learn how Chubby extends Paxos with lease timers to achieve synchronization, managing leader election and fault tolerance in large systems. Discover Chubby’s applications in Google File System and Bigtable, its design requirements, and its infrastructure for reliable coarse-grained locking and metadata storage.
Problem statement
Achieving consensus among several participants has been a challenge in distributed systems. Many attempts have been made to achieve a reliable solution to this consensus problem. Chubby, mainly a locking service, attempts to solve this consensus problem by extending an already existing consensus algorithm, Paxos, which is discussed later in this lesson. We’ll take the example of the election of a primary among peers (to be discussed later) as the core problem to which it provides a solution. We’ll also discuss how this locking service helps in the leader election in later chapters.
Note: We will discuss how this locking service helps in the leader election in later chapters.
It is a distributed consensus problem, and we need a solution based on asynchronous communication that describes the behavior of most real networks, like the Internet.
Such asynchronous communication allows packets to be lost, delayed, and reordered. Hence, our system needs a solution to achieve synchronization, coarse-grained (for longer durations) rather than fine-grained (for shorter and focused durations). It will help us solve the problem of selecting a leader from a set of otherwise equivalent servers precisely, which is the main problem statement here.
Question: Chubby utilizes coarse-grained locking instead of fine-grained locking. Can you list the primary reasons or advantages behind Chubby’s choice of coarse-grained locking?
Paxos—an existing solution
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