3.1 Leases and Mutation Order A mut

3.1 Leases and Mutation Order A mutation is an operation that changes the contents or metadata of a chunksu ch as a write or an append operation. Each mutation is performed at all the chunk’s replicas. We use leases to maintain a consistent mutation order across replicas. The master grants a chunk lease to one of the replicas, which we call the primary. The primary picks a serial order for all mutations to the chunk. All replicas follow this order when applying mutations. Thus, the global mutation order is defined first by the lease grant order chosen by the master, and within a lease by the serial numbers assigned by the primary. The lease mechanism is designed to minimize management overhead at the master. A lease has an initial timeout of 60 seconds. However, as long as the chunki s being mutated, the primary can request and typically receive extensions from the master indefinitely. These extension requests and grants are piggybacked on the HeartBeat messages regularly exchanged between the master and all chunkservers. The master may sometimes try to revoke a lease before it expires (e.g., when the master wants to disable mutations on a file that is being renamed). Even if the master loses communication with a primary, it can safely grant a new lease to another replica after the old lease expires. In Figure 2, we illustrate this process by following the control flow of a write through these numbered steps.