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Reliable State Machines: A Framework for Programming Reliable Cloud Services

Authors Suvam Mukherjee , Nitin John Raj, Krishnan Govindraj, Pantazis Deligiannis , Chandramouleswaran Ravichandran, Akash Lal, Aseem Rastogi, Raja Krishnaswamy

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  • Software and its engineering → Software reliability
  • Software and its engineering → Cloud computing
  • Software and its engineering → Software fault tolerance
Keywords
  • Fault tolerance
  • Cloud computing
  • Actor framework

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Abstract

Building reliable applications for the cloud is challenging because of unpredictable failures during a program’s execution. This paper presents a programming framework, called Reliable State Machines (RSMs), that offers fault-tolerance by construction. In our framework, an application comprises several (possibly distributed) RSMs that communicate with each other via messages, much in the style of actor-based programming. Each RSM is fault-tolerant by design, thereby offering the illusion of being "always-alive". An RSM is guaranteed to process each input request exactly once, as one would expect in a failure-free environment. The RSM runtime automatically takes care of persisting state and rehydrating it on a failover. We present the core syntax and semantics of RSMs, along with a formal proof of failure-transparency. We provide a .NET implementation of the RSM framework for deploying services to Microsoft Azure. We carry out an extensive performance evaluation on micro-benchmarks to show that one can build high-throughput applications with RSMs. We also present a case study where we rewrite a significant part of a production cloud service using RSMs. The resulting service has simpler code and exhibits production-grade performance.

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Suvam Mukherjee, Nitin John Raj, Krishnan Govindraj, Pantazis Deligiannis, Chandramouleswaran Ravichandran, Akash Lal, Aseem Rastogi, and Raja Krishnaswamy. Reliable State Machines: A Framework for Programming Reliable Cloud Services. In 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 134, pp. 18:1-18:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.18

Author Details

Suvam Mukherjee
  • Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India
Nitin John Raj
  • International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
Krishnan Govindraj
  • Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India
Pantazis Deligiannis
  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
Chandramouleswaran Ravichandran
  • Microsoft Azure, Redmond, USA
Akash Lal
  • Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India
Aseem Rastogi
  • Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India
Raja Krishnaswamy
  • Microsoft Azure, Redmond, USA

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for suggesting several ways to improve our work. Nitin John Raj’s work was done, in part, during an internship at Microsoft Research, India.

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