CNS Core: Small: Scaling Coordination for Microservices with Pangaea

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

An increasingly popular way to design applications is using an architecture that splits out the functionality of an application into many distinct micro-services. It remains challenging, however, to implement micro-services that store and update because building them requires solving many hard problems each time: providing fault tolerance, handling many concurrent operations, and scaling up the work they can do. This proposal aims to solve these hard problems in a way that can be reused across many micro-services that store and update state. It builds on an emerging design that uses a single machine, called a sequencer, to order operations to state. Compared to more traditional designs, sequencers provide better scaling of the work the micro-service does, but make providing fault tolerance and handling concurrency harder. This proposal seeks to address the shortcomings of sequencers by finding a general way to provide fault tolerance, tame concurrency, and provide even greater scaling. The proposed work has the potential to improve the performance and decrease the development time of micro-service-based systems. Given the popularity of micro-service-based systems, this has the potential to improve many applications that are an integral part of modern life. The project plans include developing software prototypes and working with large Internet services to increase the likelihood of technology transfer. In addition, the research in the project will be conducted by graduate students and undergraduate students that will learn how micro-service-based systems work as well as how to build and improve them. Each of these skills is likely to be increasingly important in the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.