Protocol-aware deterministic simulation testing

Chaitanya Bhandari from TigerBeetle presents TigerBeetle’s approach to testing distributed database systems using Protocol Aware Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST).

TigerBeetle is a distributed database using ViewStamp Replication protocol. Chaitanya explains how they achieve both logical and physical determinism to enable comprehensive testing from the inside out. He shows their testing approaches for safety invariants like strict serializability and agreement, as well as liveness properties ensuring system responsiveness. Beyond traditional black-box testing approaches like Jepsen, TigerBeetle’s protocol-aware DST provides visibility into internal consensus and storage state, allowing them to test deeper invariants and simulate complex handcrafted scenarios.

The talk also introduces deterministic performance testing (DPT) for benchmarking protocol optimizations without hardware variance, demonstrating how the same framework serves multiple purposes: correctness testing, performance validation, and system understanding.