Quorum/Consensus

to ensure strong consistency in a distributed system

In a distributed environment, a quorum is the minimum number of servers on which a distributed operation needs to be performed successfully before declaring the operation’s overall success.

Suppose a database is replicated on five machines. In that case, quorum refers to the minimum number of machines that perform the same action (commit or abort) for a given transaction in order to decide the final operation for that transaction. So, in a set of 5 machines, three machines form the majority quorum, and if they agree, we will commit that operation. Quorum enforces the consistency requirement needed for distributed operations.

In systems with multiple replicas, there is a possibility that the user reads inconsistent data. For example, when there are three replicas, R1, R2, and R3 in a cluster, and a user writes value v1 to replica R1. Then another user reads from replica R2 or R3 which are still behind R1 and thus will not have the value v1, so the second user will not get the consistent state of data.

Quorum is achieved when nodes follow the below protocol:

$R+W>N$where:

• $N$ = nodes in the quorum group
• $W$ = minimum write nodes
• $R$ = minimum read nodes

If a distributed system follows $R+W>N$ rule, then every read will see at least one copy of the latest value written. For example, a common configuration could be $N=3, W=2, R=2$ to ensure strong consistency. Here are a couple of other examples:

• $N=3, W=1, R=3$: fast write, slow read, not very durable
• $N=3, W=3, R=1$: slow write, fast read, durable

Applications

• For leader election, Chubby uses Paxos, which use quorum to ensure strong consistency.

• As stated above, quorum is also used to ensure that at least one node receives the update in case of failures. For instance, in Cassandra, to ensure data consistency, each write request can be configured to be successful only if the data has been written to at least a quorum (or majority) of replica nodes.

• Dynamo replicates writes to a sloppy quorum of other nodes in the system, instead of a strict majority quorum like Paxos. All read/write operations are performed on the first NN healthy nodes from the preference list, which may not always be the first NN nodes encountered while walking the consistent hashing ring.