Metastable failures in distributed systems
Nathan Grasso Bronson, Abutalib Aghayev, Aleksey Charapko, Timothy Zhu · 2021
We describe metastable failures---a failure pattern in distributed systems. Currently, metastable failures manifest themselves as black swan events; they are outliers because nothing in the past points to their possibility, have a severe impact, and are much easier to explain in hindsight than to predict. Although instances of metastable failures can look different at the surface, deeper analysis shows that they can be understood within the same framework.