Scalable coordination of a tightly-coupled service in the wide area
Kevin C. Webb, Bhanu C. Vattikonda, Kenneth Yocum, Alex C. Snoeren · 2013
Today's large-scale services generally exploit loosely-coupled architectures that restrict functionality requiring tight cooperation (e.g., leader election, synchronization, and reconfiguration) to a small subset of nodes. In contrast, this work presents a way to scalably deploy tightly-coupled distributed systems that require significant coordination among a large number of nodes in the wide area. Our design relies on a new group membership abstraction, circuit breaker, to preserve efficient pairwise communication despite transient link failures.