Wide-Area Group Membership for Tightly-Coupled Services

Today’s large-scale services generally exploit looselycoupled architectures that restrict functionality requir ing tight cooperation (e.g., leader election, synchronizatio n, and reconfiguration) to a small subset of nodes. In contrast, this work presents a way to scalably deploy tightlycoupled distributed systems that require significant coordination among a large number of nodes in the wide area. Our design relies upon a new reliable group membership abstraction to ensure that either group members are capable of communicating or that new groups form. In particular, we deploy a distributed rate limiting (DRL) service within a global testbed infrastructure. Unlike most distributed services, DRL can safely operate in separate partitions simultaneously, but requires timel y snapshots of global state within each. Our DRL implementation leverages our proposed group membership