Agora: A Dependable High-Performance Coordination Service for Multi-cores

Abstract

Coordination services are essential building blocks of today's data centers as they provide processes of distributed applications with means to reliably exchange data. Consequently, coordination services must deliver high performance to ensure that they do not become a bottleneck for the applications depending on them. Unfortunately, the design of existing services such as ZooKeeper prevents them from scaling with the number of cores on a machine. In this paper, we address this problem with Agora, a high-performance coordination service that is able to both effectively and efficiently utilize multi-core machines. Agora relies on a primary-backup replication architecture that partitions the workload on each server to achieve parallelism while still providing similar consistency guarantees as ZooKeeper. Our evaluation shows that Agora scales with the number of cores and thus can fully utilize the network resources available.