Abstract:

We describe PNUTS, a massively parallel and geographi- cally distributed database system for Yahoo!’s web applica- tions. PNUTS provides data storage organized as hashed or ordered tables, low latency for large numbers of con- current requests including updates and queries, and novel per-record consistency guarantees. It is a hosted, centrally managed, and geographically distributed service, and uti- lizes automated load-balancing and failover to reduce oper- ational complexity. The first version of the system is cur- rently serving in production. We describe the motivation for PNUTS and the design and implementation of its table storage and replication layers, and then present experimen- tal results.