Distributed Instance System for Automated Failure Handling
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Large distributed applications face management challenges due to unreliable distributed communications, requiring significant manual intervention to handle failed processes and unroutable messages, which becomes unmanageable at scale.
Innovation Solution
A distributed instance system that manages instances with awareness of their lifetimes and restricted message exchange patterns, eliminating the need for user intervention by automatically handling failures and message routing based on intended use, optimizing for scalability and low administrative overhead.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If manual intervention is used to handle failed processes and unroutable messages, then system reliability is improved, but device complexity and administrative overhead increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-service through automatic detection and handling of failed processes. The instance manager monitors message exchanges, automatically identifies stalled processes, and cleans up unroutable messages without human intervention. This transforms the manual compensation approach into an autonomous self-managing system, resolving the contradiction by maintaining reliability while eliminating administrative overhead.
Solution Approach 2:
The system establishes feedback loops where the instance manager continuously monitors message exchange patterns and process states. When failures or unroutable messages are detected, the system automatically responds by cleaning up the issues and adjusting process management. This closed-loop feedback mechanism ensures system reliability while operating autonomously, addressing both aspects of the contradiction.
2Reliability
If extensive infrastructure is deployed to support manual intervention, then system reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complex infrastructure components (dead-letter queues, suspended process reporting systems) that were designed to support manual intervention. By removing these extensive infrastructure elements and replacing them with an instance manager that handles failures programmatically, the system maintains reliability while significantly reducing infrastructure complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces the mechanical/manual infrastructure (dead-letter queues requiring manual processing, suspended process reporting) with an automated software-based instance manager. This substitution eliminates the need for extensive manual support infrastructure while maintaining system reliability through programmatic failure handling.
3Reliability
If human operators manage large numbers of unrouted messages and stalled processes, then system reliability is maintained, but ease of operation deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The instance manager provides self-service by automatically detecting, identifying, and cleaning up unrouted messages and stalled processes. This eliminates the need for human operators to manually manage these issues, maintaining system reliability while dramatically improving ease of operation through autonomous management.
4Ease of operation
If automated failure handling is implemented, then ease of operation is improved, but reliability may worsen due to lack of human judgment
Solution Approach 1:
The instance manager implements continuous feedback monitoring of message exchange patterns and process states. By automatically detecting anomalies such as stalled processes and unroutable messages through this feedback mechanism, the system provides automated failure handling that maintains reliability through intelligent detection and response, while improving ease of operation by eliminating manual intervention.
Data Source
Figure 1~3
Figure 4~5
Figure 6~8
AI summary
A distributed instance system manages instances and communications between the instances. The distributed instance system provides a restricted set of communication methods to the instances. Based on the type of communication method used, the distributed instance system has knowledge of the messages sent by instances and can make decisions on how to handle the messages. When one of the instances involved in a message exchange ends, the host uses its knowledge of the message exchange type to determine whether to drop the message, drop a reply to the message, and/or send an error message to the surviving instance. An instance may create one or more child instances in a tree-like configuration. Status data is passed up the tree from children instances and aggregated in the parent instances. Monitoring data may be generated from the aggregated status data.