Consistent Distributed Storage

Book excerpt: Providing a shared memory abstraction in distributed systems is a powerful tool that can simplify the design and implementation of software systems for networked platforms. This enables the system designers to work with abstract readable and writable objects without the need to deal with the complexity and dynamism of the underlying platform. The key property of shared memory implementations is the consistency guarantee that it provides under concurrent access to the shared objects. The most intuitive memory consistency model is atomicity because of its equivalence with a memory system where accesses occur serially, one at a time. Emulations of shared atomic memory in distributed systems is an active area of research and development. The problem proves to be challenging, and especially so in distributed message passing settings with unreliable components, as is often the case in networked systems. We present several approaches to implementing shared memory services with the help of replication on top of message-passing distributed platforms subject to a variety of perturbations in the computing medium.