Riak PG: distributed process groups on dynamo-style distributed storage

Abstract

We present Riak PG, a new Erlang process group registry for highly available applications. The Riak PG system is a Dynamo-based, distributed, fault-tolerant, named process group registry for use as an alternative to the built-in Erlang process group facility, pg2, and the globally distributed extended process registry, gproc. Riak PG aims to provide a highly-available, fault-tolerant, distributed registry by sacrificing strong consistency for eventual consistency in applications where availability of the registry is paramount to application function and performance.