Taming uncertainty in distributed systems with help from the network

Abstract

Network and process failures cause complexity in distributed applications. When a remote process does not respond, the application cannot tell if the process or network have failed, or if they are just slow. Without this information, applications can lose availability or correctness. To address this problem, we propose Albatross, a service that quickly reports to applications the current status of a remote process---whether it is working and reachable, or not. Albatross is targeted at data centers equipped with software defined networks (SDNs), allowing it to discover and enforce network partitions: Albatross borrows the old observation that it can be better to cause a problem than to live with uncertainty, and applies this idea to networks. When enforcing partitions, Albatross avoids disruption by disconnecting only individual processes (not entire hosts), and by allowing them to reconnect if the application chooses. We show that, under Albatross, distributed applications can bypass the complexity caused by network failures and that they become more available.