{"id":355781,"date":"2017-01-19T15:26:06","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T23:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=355781"},"modified":"2022-01-18T06:14:52","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T14:14:52","slug":"geo-distribution-actor-based-services","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/geo-distribution-actor-based-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Geo-Distribution of Actor-Based Services (Preliminary TechReport)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This technical report is now redundant, see our conference publication<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Many service applications use actors as a programming model for the middle tier, to simplify synchronization, fault-tolerance, and scalability. However, efficient operation of such actors in multiple, geographically distant datacenters is challenging, due to the very high communication latency.<\/p>\n

We present Geo<\/em>, an open-source geo-distributed actor system that improves performance by caching actor states in one or more datacenters, yet guarantees the existence of a single latest version by virtue of a distributed cache coherence protocol.\u00a0Geo<\/em> supports both volatile and persistent actors, and supports updates with a choice of linearizable and eventual consistency. Our evaluation on several workloads shows substantial performance benefits, and confirms the advantage of supporting both replicated and single-instance coherence protocols as configuration choices. For example, replication can provide fast, always-available reads and updates globally, while batching of linearizable storage accesses at a single location can boost the throughput of an order processing workload by 7x.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This technical report is now redundant, see our conference publication) Many service applications use actors as a programming model for the middle tier, to simplify synchronization, fault-tolerance, and scalability. However, efficient operation of such actors in multiple, geographically distant datacenters is challenging, due to the very high communication latency. We present Geo, an open-source geo-distributed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560,13547],"msr-publication-type":[193718],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-355781","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2017-1-19","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"MSR-TR-2017-3","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"Microsoft","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"357110","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Geo-Orleans-TR-012717.pdf","id":"357110","title":"Geo-Orleans-TR-012717","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Phil Bernstein","user_id":33253,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Phil Bernstein"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sebastian Burckhardt","user_id":33544,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Sebastian Burckhardt"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sergey Bykov","user_id":33545,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Sergey Bykov"},{"type":"text","value":"Natacha Crooks","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Jose Faleiro","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Gabriel Kliot","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Alok Kumbhare","user_id":36086,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Alok Kumbhare"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Muntasir Raihan Rahman","user_id":41308,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Muntasir Raihan Rahman"},{"type":"text","value":"Vivek Shah","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Adriana Szekeres","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jorgen Thelin","user_id":32428,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jorgen Thelin"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144927],"msr_project":[170573],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"techreport","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":170573,"post_title":"Orleans - Virtual Actors","post_name":"orleans-virtual-actors","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2010-10-14 17:19:52","post_modified":"2018-04-02 13:24:10","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/orleans-virtual-actors\/","post_excerpt":"Project \"Orleans\" invented the Virtual Actor abstraction, which provides a straightforward approach to building distributed interactive\u00a0applications, without the need to learn complex programming\u00a0patterns for handling concurrency, fault tolerance, and resource management. 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