Design Rationale

We now know the shape of Chubby: cells, replicas, a master, and a small set of APIs. This lesson explains why it was built that way, and what problems each choice actually solves.

Before we go further into how Chubby works, it helps to understand the logic behind its design decisions. The same lessons apply to other problems of a similar shape.

Why was Chubby built as a service?

Start with the alternative. Instead of a service, Google could have shipped a client library that only implements Paxos