Highly Auditable Distributed Systems

Auditability is a key requirement for providing scalability and availability to distributed systems. Auditability allows us to identify latent concurrency bugs, dependencies among events, and performance bottlenecks. Our work focuses on providing auditability by combining two key concepts: time and causality. In particular, we prescribe hybrid logical clocks (HLC) which offer the functionality of logical clocks while keeping them close to physical clocks. We propose that HLC can enable effective detection of invariant predicate violations and latent concurrency bugs, and provide efficient means to correct the state of the distributed system back to good states.