Reliable State Machines: A Framework for Programming Reliable Cloud Services
Abstract
Building reliable applications for the cloud is challenging because of unpredictable failures during a program's execution. This paper presents a programming framework called Reliable State Machines (RSMs), that offers fault-tolerance by construction. Using our framework, a programmer can build an application as several (possibly distributed) RSMs that communicate with each other via messages, much in the style of actor-based programming. Each RSM is additionally fault-tolerant by design and offers the illusion of being "always-alive". An RSM is guaranteed to process each input request exactly once, as one would expect in a failure-free environment. The RSM runtime automatically takes care of persisting state and rehydrating it on a failover. We present the core syntax and semantics of RSMs, along with a formal proof of failure-transparency. We provide an implementation of the RSM framework and runtime on the .NET platform for deploying services to Microsoft Azure. We carried out an extensive performance evaluation on micro-benchmarks to show that one can build high-throughput applications with RSMs. We also present a case study where we rewrote a significant part of a production cloud service using RSMs. The resulting service has simpler code and exhibits production-grade performance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.09502,
title = {Reliable State Machines: A Framework for Programming Reliable Cloud Services},
author = {Suvam Mukherjee and Nitin John Raj and Krishnan Govindraj and Pantazis Deligiannis and Chandramouleswaran Ravichandran and Akash Lal and Aseem Rastogi and Raja Krishnaswamy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.09502},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
R1: This replacement contains minor formatting improvements over the original R2: Anonymized "popular cloud service provider" phrase replaced with "Microsoft Azure"