skip to main content
10.1145/2043556.2043571acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessospConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Windows Azure Storage: a highly available cloud storage service with strong consistency

Published:23 October 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a cloud storage system that provides customers the ability to store seemingly limitless amounts of data for any duration of time. WAS customers have access to their data from anywhere at any time and only pay for what they use and store. In WAS, data is stored durably using both local and geographic replication to facilitate disaster recovery. Currently, WAS storage comes in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery). In this paper, we describe the WAS architecture, global namespace, and data model, as well as its resource provisioning, load balancing, and replication systems.

References

  1. J. Baker et al., "Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services," in Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2011.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Eric A. Brewer. "Towards Robust Distributed Systems. (Invited Talk)," in Principles of Distributed Computing, Portland, Oregon, 2000. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. M. Burrows, "The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems," in OSDI, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. F. Chang et al., "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data," in OSDI, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. B. Cooper et al., "PNUTS: Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform," VLDB, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. G. DeCandia et al., "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store," in SOSP, 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Cristian Estan and George Varghese, "New Directions in Traffic Measurement and Accounting," in SIGCOMM, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. S. Ghemawat, H. Gobioff, and S. T. Leung, "The Google File System," in SOSP, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. J. Gray, P. Helland, P. O'Neil, and D. Shasha, "The Dangers of Replication and a Solution," in SIGMOD, 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Albert Greenberg et al., "VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network," Communications of the ACM, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 95--104, 2011. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Y. Hu and Q. Yang, "DCD---Disk Caching Disk: A New Approach for Boosting I/O Performance," in ISCA, 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. H. T. Kung and John T. Robinson, "On Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control," ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 213--226, June 1981. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Leslie Lamport, "The Part-Time Parliament," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 133--169, May 1998. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. A. Malik and P. Lakshman, "Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system," SIGOPS Operating System Review, vol. 44, no. 2, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. M. McKusick and S. Quinlan, "GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward," ACM File Systems, vol. 7, no. 7, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. S. Mysore, B. Agrawal, T. Sherwood, N. Shrivastava, and S. Suri, "Profiling over Adaptive Ranges," in Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. P. O'Neil, E. Cheng, D. Gawlick, and E. O'Neil, "The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-tree)," Acta Informatica - ACTA, vol. 33, no. 4, 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. H. Patterson et al., "SnapMirror: File System Based Asynchronous Mirroring for Disaster Recovery," in USENIX-FAST, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon, "Polynomial Codes over Certain Finite Fields," Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 300--304, 1960.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. R. Renesse and F. Schneider, "Chain Replication for Supporting High Throughput and Availability," in USENIX-OSDI, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. J. Terrace and M. Freedman, "Object Storage on CRAQ: High-throughput chain replication for read-mostly workloads," in USENIX'09, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. D. Terry, K. Petersen M. Theimer, A. Demers, M. Spreitzer, and C. Hauser, "Managing Update Conflicts in Bayou, A Weakly Connected Replicated Storage System," in ACM SOSP, 1995. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. W. Vogel, "All Things Distributed - Choosing Consistency," in http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/02/strong_consistency_simpledb.html, 2010.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Windows Azure Storage: a highly available cloud storage service with strong consistency

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Login options

        Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

        Sign in
        • Published in

          cover image ACM Conferences
          SOSP '11: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
          October 2011
          417 pages
          ISBN:9781450309776
          DOI:10.1145/2043556

          Copyright © 2011 ACM

          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 23 October 2011

          Permissions

          Request permissions about this article.

          Request Permissions

          Check for updates

          Qualifiers

          • research-article

          Acceptance Rates

          Overall Acceptance Rate131of716submissions,18%

          Upcoming Conference

          SOSP '24

        PDF Format

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader