Using Paxos to Build a Lightweight, Highly Available Key-Value Data Store

Key-value data store has been widely used in e-commerce systems. The availability issue, which means no data loss and continuous service to users, is quite essential in such systems. This paper presents a lightweight, highly available architecture of key-value data store. This architecture uses a Paxos-based replication protocol to make synchronous replications among replicas. The replication protocol enjoys good performance and consistency, and proves to fit key-value model well. By integrating the high-performance replication module with local data store engine, the real system implemented can tolerant up to (N/2-1) failures without any loss of data and provide continuous service as usual. With these desired properties, the system can be used to develop highly available e-commerce systems and provide "always-on" services to users.