bcobb

Managing Update Conflicts in Bayou

Nov 9, 2014

This week’s Hacker School Paper of the Week is Managing Update Conflicts in Bayou, a Weakly Connected Replicated Storage System. From the paper, “Bayou is a replicated, weakly consistent storage system designed for…less than ideal network connectivity.” Two humble logs—the Write Log and the Undo Log—allow Bayou to handle poor network connectivity1. As you might expect, each entry in the Write Log (a “Write operation”) corresponds to a Write issued to the server. Each Write operation also knows two important things:

  1. How to determine if it will conflict with an existing Write operation. In Bayou, this is called a dependency check.
  2. An algorithm to construct an alternative, non-conflicting Write operation2 in the event there is a conflict. In Bayou, this is called a merge procedure.

The motivation for storing these two procedures is that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a Bayou server to behave intelligently with respect to an arbitrary domain. So, instead of tailoring Bayou servers for use with a limited set of domains, Bayou servers can run arbitrary, domain-specific code supplied by their clients, which are embedded in the domain.

This sort of inversion of control is, to me, the big idea behind Bayou—it’s what makes Bayou a general-purpose storage system. Accordingly, I want to know more about how it works!

The authors mention that the merge procedures are written in Tcl, and then executed with a Bayou-specific Tcl interpreter, but they never discussed the rationale for using Tcl. What made Tcl a good fit for the task? What does it look like to modify a Tcl interpreter to impose the sorts of constraints outlined in the paper? How fun would it be to write a Bayou server/client stub in Clojure or Elixir and just send quoted code around for both dependency checks and merge procedures?


This paper was fun to read, approachable, and a fertile bed for future project ideas—thanks to Maggie Zhou for suggesting it! For those in the Bay Area, Peter Bailis is giving a talk on the paper at the December Papers We Love SF meetup. Definitely check it out if you can!


  1. With better planning, a rough implementation of the Write Log-Undo Log-Tuple Store trifecta would have been a solid code contribution for the week. 

  2. A simple non-conflicting operation might just be to insert an entry into some error table noting the problem. In practice, Bayou clients would probably rather provide a procedure that actually tries to resolve the conflict.