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machi/README.md
Scott Lystig Fritchie 0f24b69378 README and FAQ updates for mid-March 2016
2016-03-09 12:19:50 -08:00

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Machi: a distributed, decentralized blob/large file store

Travis-CI :: Travis-CI

Outline

  1. Why another blob/file store?
  2. Where to learn more about Machi
  3. Development status summary
  4. Contributing to Machi's development
## 1. Why another blob/file store?

Our goal is a robust & reliable, distributed, highly available, large file and blob store. Such stores already exist, both in the open source world and in the commercial world. Why reinvent the wheel? We believe there are three reasons, ordered by decreasing rarity.

  1. We want end-to-end checksums for all file data, from the initial file writer to every file reader, anywhere, all the time.
  2. We need flexibility to trade consistency for availability: e.g. weak consistency in exchange for being available in cases of partial system failure.
  3. We want to manage file replicas in a way that's provably correct and also easy to test.

Criteria #3 is difficult to find in the open source world but perhaps not impossible.

If we have app use cases where availability is more important than consistency, then systems that meet criteria #2 are also rare. Most file stores provide only strong consistency and therefore have unavoidable, unavailable behavior when parts of the system fail. What if we want a file store that is always available to write new file data and attempts best-effort file reads?

If we really do care about data loss and/or data corruption, then we really want both #3 and #1. Unfortunately, systems that meet criteria #1 are very rare. (Nonexistant?) Why? This is 2015. We have decades of research that shows that computer hardware can (and indeed does) corrupt data at nearly every level of the modern client/server application stack. Systems with end-to-end data corruption detection should be ubiquitous today. Alas, they are not.

Machi is an effort to change the deplorable state of the world, one Erlang function at a time.

 ## 2. Where to learn more about Machi

The two major design documents for Machi are now mostly stable. Please see the doc directory's README for details.

We also have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list.

Scott recently (November 2015) gave a presentation at the RICON 2015 conference about one of the techniques used by Machi; "Managing Chain Replication Metadata with Humming Consensus" is available online now.

See later in this document for how to run the Humming Consensus demos, including the network partition simulator.

## 3. Development status summary

Mid-March 2016: The Machi development team has been downsized in recent months, and the pace of development has slowed. Here is a summary of the status of Machi's major components.

  • Humming Consensus and the chain manager

    • No new safety bugs have been found by model-checking tests.
    • A new document, Hands-on experiments with Machi and Humming Consensus is now available. It is a tutorial for setting up a 3 virtual machine Machi cluster and how to demonstrate the chain manager's reactions to server stops & starts, crashes & restarts, and pauses (simulated by SIGSTOP and SIGCONT).
    • The chain manager can still make suboptimal-but-safe choices for chain transitions when a server hangs/pauses temporarily.
      • Recent chain manager changes have made the instability window much shorter when the slow/paused server resumes execution.
      • Scott believes that a modest change to the chain manager's calculation of a new projection can reduce flapping in this (and many other cases) less likely. Currently, the new local projection is calculated using only local state (i.e., the chain manager's internal state + the fitness server's state). However, if the "latest" projection read from the public projection stores were also input to the new projection calculation function, then many obviously bad projections can be avoided without needing rounds of Humming Consensus to demonstrate that a bad projection is bad.

  • FLU/data server process

    • All known correctness bugs have been fixed.
    • Performance has not yet been measured. Performance measurement and enhancements are scheduled to start in the middle of March 2016. (This will include a much-needed update to the basho_bench driver.)

  • Access protocols and client libraries

    • The protocol used by both external clients and internally (instead of using Erlang's native message passing mechanisms) is based on Protocol Buffers.
      • (Machi PB protocol specification: ./src/machi.proto)[./src/machi.proto]
      • At the moment, the PB specification contains two protocols. Sometime in the near future, the spec will be split to separate the external client API (the "high" protocol) from the internal communication API (the "low" protocol).

  • Recent conference talks about Machi

## 4. Contributing to Machi's development

4.1 License

Basho Technologies, Inc. as committed to licensing all work for Machi under the Apache Public License version 2. All authors of source code and documentation who agree with these licensing terms are welcome to contribute their ideas in any form: suggested design or features, documentation, and source code.

Machi is still a very young project within Basho, with a small team of developers; please bear with us as we grow out of "toddler" stage into a more mature open source software project. We invite all contributors to review the CONTRIBUTING.md document for guidelines for working with the Basho development team.

4.2 Development environment requirements

All development to date has been done with Erlang/OTP version 17 on OS X. The only known limitations for using R16 are minor type specification difference between R16 and 17, but we strongly suggest continuing development using version 17.

We also assume that you have the standard UNIX/Linux developer tool chain for C and C++ applications. Also, we assume that Git and GNU Make are available. The utility used to compile the Machi source code, rebar, is pre-compiled and included in the repo. For more details, please see the Machi development environment prerequisites doc.

Machi has a dependency on the ELevelDB library. ELevelDB only supports UNIX/Linux OSes and 64-bit versions of Erlang/OTP only; we apologize to Windows-based and 32-bit-based Erlang developers for this restriction.

4.3 New protocols and features

If you'd like to work on a protocol such as Thrift, UBF, msgpack over UDP, or some other protocol, let us know by opening an issue to discuss it.