Structured Allocation-based Consistent Hashing with Improved Balancing for Cloud Infrastructure

Consistent hashing has played an indispensable role in cloud infrastructure, although its load balancing performance is not necessarily perfect. Consistent hashing has long remained the most widely used method despite many methods being proposed to improve load balancing because these methods trade off load balancing against consistency, memory usage, lookup performance, and/or fault-tolerance. This article presents Structured Allocation-based Consistent Hashing (SACH), a cloud-optimized consistent hashing algorithm that overcomes the trade-offs by taking advantage of the characteristics of cloud environments: scaling management and auto-healing. Since scaling can be distinguished from failures, SACH applies two different algorithms to update hashing functions: a fast-update algorithm for unmanaged backend failures to satisfy fault-tolerance with quick response and a slow-update algorithm for managed scaling. Hashing functions are initialized or slow-updated considering the characteristics of the fast-update algorithm to satisfy load balancing and the other properties as far as the number of failed backends is kept small by auto-healing. The experimental results show that SACH outperforms existing algorithms in each aspect. SACH will improve the load balancing of cloud infrastructure components, where the trade-offs have prevented the renewal of hashing functions.