TY - GEN
T1 - Detecting failures in distributed systems with the Falcon spy network
AU - Leners, Joshua B.
AU - Wu, Hao
AU - Hung, Wei Lun
AU - Aguilera, Marcos K.
AU - Walfish, Michael
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - A common way for a distributed system to tolerate crashes is to explicitly detect them and then recover from them. Interestingly, detection can take much longer than recovery, as a result of many advances in recovery techniques, making failure detection the dominant factor in these systems' unavailability when a crash occurs. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Falcon, a failure detector with several features. First, Falcon's common-case detection time is sub-second, which keeps unavailability low. Second, Falcon is reliable: it never reports a process as down when it is actually up. Third, Falcon sometimes kills to achieve reliable detection but aims to kill the smallest needed component. Falcon achieves these features by coordinating a network of spies, each monitoring a layer of the system. Falcon's main cost is a small amount of platform-specific logic. Falcon is thus the first failure detector that is fast, reliable, and viable. As such, it could change the way that a class of distributed systems is built.
AB - A common way for a distributed system to tolerate crashes is to explicitly detect them and then recover from them. Interestingly, detection can take much longer than recovery, as a result of many advances in recovery techniques, making failure detection the dominant factor in these systems' unavailability when a crash occurs. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Falcon, a failure detector with several features. First, Falcon's common-case detection time is sub-second, which keeps unavailability low. Second, Falcon is reliable: it never reports a process as down when it is actually up. Third, Falcon sometimes kills to achieve reliable detection but aims to kill the smallest needed component. Falcon achieves these features by coordinating a network of spies, each monitoring a layer of the system. Falcon's main cost is a small amount of platform-specific logic. Falcon is thus the first failure detector that is fast, reliable, and viable. As such, it could change the way that a class of distributed systems is built.
KW - STONITH
KW - failure detectors
KW - high availability
KW - layer-specific monitors
KW - layer-specific probes
KW - reliable detection
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=82655165279&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=82655165279&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2043556.2043583
DO - 10.1145/2043556.2043583
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:82655165279
SN - 9781450309776
T3 - SOSP'11 - Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
SP - 279
EP - 294
BT - SOSP'11 - Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
T2 - 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP 2011
Y2 - 23 October 2011 through 26 October 2011
ER -