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Dynamic Membership

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Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems

Part of the book series: Texts in Computer Science ((TCS))

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Abstract

The context established by Chap. 10 provides conceptual tools to develop an automated and highly dynamic membership tracking service, in which membership of a system varies as service instances are launched and join an active system, shut down and must leave it, or crash. We solve the problem in steps, first showing how a system can track its own membership, and then showing how the resulting group membership system (GMS) can be used to support the creation of protocols that, themselves, can largely ignore dynamic membership.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Readers interested in learning more about that first step might want to look at Shlomi Dolev’s work on self-stabilization (Dolev 2000). A self-stabilizing bootstrap algorithm would work as follows. During periods when applications can find an active membership service, they would do so. But if an application is launched and cannot find the service, it would run Dolev’s self-stabilizing leader election protocol. That protocol can automatically handle various numbers of concurrent processes and is guaranteed to eventually converge to a state in which a single leader has been picked and every process knows who the leader is (the eventual convergence does require that any severe churn that may be happening settle down). At any rate, once this bootstrap step selects a leader, one would delay for a sufficient amount of time to have reasonable confidence that two leaders have not been picked (Dolev’s theory lets us calculate the needed delay). Finally, the leader could boot our dynamic membership protocol. Non-leaders, in contrast, simply wait until the leader is running the membership protocol, at which point they join the now-running system. In effect, we would run the self-stabilization protocol only while no copies of the membership service are active. Thus, the normal case becomes one in which the membership service is running, and some processes either wish to join, or are terminating deliberately, or seem to have failed (other processes are reporting timeouts). We would revert to the self-stabilization approach again if all copies of the membership service crash, but otherwise will not use it again.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Kenneth P. Birman

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Birman, K.P. (2012). Dynamic Membership. In: Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_11

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