shivanshkc / contester

A program that tests whether a given key-store implementation is consistent + partition-tolerant.

Contester

A program that tests any consensus algorithm implementation by running it in simulated network partitions and faults.

How to use

The simulation runs when the simulation.Run function is called. It accepts simulation.Config and a slice of simulation.ExternalAPI interfaces.

For the first parameter, the simulation package provides a quickstart config, called simulation.QuickStartConfig. Users can provide their custom simulation config as well. Go through the code comments on the simulation.Config struct to understand the meaning of all fields.

The second parameter requires you to implement the consensus algorithm that needs to be tested. The type of the parameter is []simulation.ExternalAPI. Here, each element of the slice represents a node in the distributed system.

The methods of the simulation.ExternalAPI type are invoked with simulation.Context instead of Go's standard context.Context. This is because the custom context type encapsulates methods that should be used by the implementations to be simulated correctly.

To learn more about how to write a simulation.ExternalAPI implementation, go through the existing implementations, namely pkg/kevlar and pkg/naive.