Delta State Replicated Data Types

CRDTs are distributed data types that make eventual consistency of a distributed object possible and non ad-hoc. Specifically, state-based CRDTs ensure convergence through disseminating the entire state, that may be large, and merging it to other replicas; whereas operation-based CRDTs disseminate operations (i.e., small states) assuming an exactly-once reliable dissemination layer. We introduce Delta State Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (δ-CRDTs) that can achieve the best of both worlds: small messages with an incremental nature, as in operation-based CRDTs, disseminated over unreliable communication channels, as in traditional state-based CRDTs. This is achieved by defining delta mutators to return a delta-state, typically with a much smaller size than the full state, that to be joined with both local and remote states. We introduce the δ-CRDT framework, and we explain it through establishing a correspondence to current state-based CRDTs. In addition, we present an anti-entropy algorithm for eventual convergence, and another one that ensures causal consistency. Finally, we introduce several δ-CRDT specifications of both well-known replicated datatypes and novel datatypes, including a generic map composition.