Why it matters

Chubby's design shaped ZooKeeper, etcd, and every modern coordination service. Understanding illuminates the space.

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The architecture

Clients: use library for coarse-grained locking.

Cell: 5-server replica set. Paxos for consensus.

Chubby architectureCell (5 servers)Paxos consensusNamespacehierarchical filesSessions + eventswith leasesChubby files small (kilobytes); metadata + coordination, not data storage
Chubby components.
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How it works end to end

Namespace: hierarchical files like filesystem. Small file sizes (KB).

Locks: acquire file for exclusive access. Coarse-grained.

Sessions: client-server keep-alives. Session expiration triggers cleanup.

Watches: notification on file changes.