Filo: Consolidated Consensus As A Cloud Service

Consensus is at the core of many production-grade distributed systems. Given the prevalence of these systems, it is important to offer consensus as a cloud service. To match the multi-tenant requirements of the cloud, consensus as a service must provide performance guarantees, and prevent aggressive tenants from disrupting the others. Fulfilling this goal is not trivial without over-provisioning and under-utilizing resources.We present Filo, the first system to provide consensus as a multi-tenant cloud service with throughput guarantees and efficient utilization of cloud resources. Tenants request an SLA by specifying their target throughput and degree of fault-tolerance. Filo then efficiently consolidates tenants on a shared set of servers using a novel placement algorithm that respects constraints imposed by the consensus problem. To respond to the load variations at runtime, Filo proposes a novel distributed controller that piggybacks on the consensus protocol to coordinate resource allocations across the servers and distribute the unused capacity fairly. Using a real testbed and simulations, we show that our placement algorithm is efficient at consolidating tenants, and while obtaining comparable efficiency and fairness, our distributed controller is similar to 5x faster than the centralized baseline approach.