GlobalFS: A Strongly Consistent Multi-site File System

Abstract

This paper introduces GlobalFS, a POSIX-compliant geographically distributed file system. GlobalFS builds on two fundamental building blocks, an atomic multicast group communication abstraction and multiple instances of a single-site data store. We define four execution modes and show how all file system operations can be implemented with these modes while ensuring strong consistency and tolerating failures. We describe the GlobalFS prototype in detail and report on an extensive performance assessment. We have deployed GlobalFS across all EC2 regions and show that the system scales geographically, providing performance comparable to other state-of-the-art distributed file systems for local commands and allowing for strongly consistent operations over the whole system. The code of GlobalFS is available as open source.