External Store Federation Membership Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing federation systems face challenges in efficiently managing membership, particularly in joining new nodes and removing existing nodes, due to the requirement of a quorum of seed nodes being alive at all times, which limits their availability and reliability.
Innovation Solution
The proposed architecture utilizes a highly available external datastore to manage node membership, allowing new nodes to join the federation through an external store that provides get/put semantics with transaction consistency guarantees, and maintains leases to ensure only one ring exists within the collection, eliminating the need for a quorum of seed nodes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a quorum of seed nodes is required to be alive at all times for federation membership management, then routing consistency is maintained, but system availability and reliability deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an external datastore as an intermediary between nodes and the federation membership management system. This external store holds the authoritative state of node membership, allowing nodes to join or leave by interacting with the external store rather than requiring coordination with a quorum of seed nodes. The external datastore mediates the membership changes and ensures consistency without requiring seed node availability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent moves the membership state from being distributed across seed nodes to being stored in an external datastore, effectively changing the dimensional organization of the system. By externalizing the state storage to a separate dimension (external store vs. internal seed node storage), the system achieves improved availability while maintaining consistency through the lease mechanism.
2Stability of the object's composition
If nodes join through distributed protocol with seed nodes, then routing consistency is ensured, but system complexity and operational difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the membership state management from the distributed seed node system and places it in an external datastore. This separation simplifies the node join/leave process by removing the need for complex distributed protocol interactions with multiple seed nodes, while routing consistency is maintained through the lease-based state management in the external store.
3Adaptability or versatility
If multiple rings can form in the federation, then node joining flexibility increases, but system reliability and consistency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism through leases in the external datastore. When a node joins, it acquires a lease that prevents other nodes from creating additional rings. The lease acts as feedback control that monitors and enforces the single-ring constraint, allowing flexible node joining while maintaining federation consistency by preventing multiple concurrent rings.
Data Source
AI summary
Architecture that applies to a collection of nodes (e.g., a federation) and manages membership of the nodes to the collection via an external datastore. The storage of node state and collection state is stored in the external and highly available datastore. New nodes can now join the collection through the external store. The machines (nodes) in the collection create a lease with the external store that allows the external store to maintain precise knowledge of the set of machines alive in the collection. The external store thus allows the new machines to join the collection while ensuring that there exists only one ring in the collection. In other words, the disclosed architecture protocol ensures that any given point of time there is just one ring for the collection. Moreover, this can be in addition to a current join protocol, which ensures that consistent routing is available.