Leader election protocols are a fundamental building blockfor replicated distributed services. They ease the design of leader-basedcoordination protocols that tolerate failures. In partially synchronoussystems, designing a leader election algorithm, that does not permit mul-tiple leaders while the system is unstable, is a complex task. As a resultmany production systems use third-party distributed coordination ser-vices, such as ZooKeeper and Chubby, to provide a reliable leader electionservice. However, adding a third-party service such as ZooKeeper to adistributed system incurs additional operational costs and complexity.ZooKeeper instances must be kept running on at least three machinesto ensure its high availability. In this paper, we present a novel leaderelection protocol using NewSQL databases for partially synchronous sys-tems, that ensures at most one leader at any given time. The leaderelection protocol uses the database as distributed shared memory. Ourwork enables distributed systems that already use NewSQL databasesto save the operational overhead of managing an additional third-partyservice for leader election. Our main contribution is the design, imple-mentation and validation of a practical leader election algorithm, basedon NewSQL databases, that has performance comparable to a leaderelection implementation using a state-of-the-art distributed coordinationservice, ZooKeeper
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