Composite Replicated Data Types: eventually consistent libraries as non-leaky abstractions

Composite Replicated Data Types Alexey Gotsman and Hongseok Yang 2015

Modern large-scale distributed systems often rely on eventually consistent replicated stores, which achieve scalability in exchange for providing weak semantic guarantees. To compensate for this weakness, researchers have proposed various abstractions for programming on eventual consistency, such as replicated data types for resolving conflicting updates at different replicas and weak forms of transactions for maintaining relationships among objects. However, the subtle semantics of these abstractions makes using them correctly far from trivial.

To address this challenge, we propose composite replicated data types, which formalise a common way of organising applications on top of eventually consistent stores. Similarly to a class or an abstract data type, a composite data type encapsulates objects of replicated data types and operations used to access them, implemented using transactions. We develop a method for reasoning about programs with composite data types that reflects their modularity: the method allows abstracting away the internals of composite data type implementations when reasoning about their clients. We express the method as a denotational semantics for a programming language with composite data types. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our semantics by applying it to verify subtle data type examples and prove that it is sound and complete with respect to a standard non-compositional semantics