[Openstack] Failure and Membership detection in Swift

John Dickinson me at not.mn
Fri Jan 30 21:21:58 UTC 2015


There's a ton of info available at https://swiftstack.com/openstack-swift/. Specifically, take a look at https://swiftstack.com/openstack-swift/architecture/ for how Swift solves some of these issues.

You might also find the info at http://swift.openstack.org useful, especially http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/admin_guide.html.

For more info on failure handling, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKZ7kDDPSIU where I went through several failure conditions and show how Swift recovers from them. There's also a much older blog post at https://swiftstack.com/blog/2012/09/13/how-openstack-swift-handles-hardware-failures/.

While it might not be the academic paper you're looking for, this should give a good groundwork of info. If you have other questions, feel free to ask.

--John


> On Jan 30, 2015, at 12:56 PM, Behrooz Shafiee <shafiee01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> 
>  Unfortunately, I could not find any academic paper which describes Swift in academic terms, most of documents are user manual and general overview. I need to know some details about Swift which I could not find in the public documents.
> 1) How does membership detection works in Swift (discovering newly added nodes)?
> Digging this link, I realized unlike many other systems (Dynamo, Cassandra,...) Swift does not use a gossip based protocol. And it seems that it is being handled by the concept of Rings;however, what is a Ringbuilder? is it a central service or a distributed protocol? what if it fails? How rings info and its changes are shared among different nodes?
> 
> 2)How failure detection works in Swift?
> Going through OpenStack Swift book by Joe Arnold, I realized a timeout-based mechanism by health-monitor is in charge of finding failures. Is that correct?
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> --
> Behrooz
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack
> Post to     : openstack at lists.openstack.org
> Unsubscribe : http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/attachments/20150130/2e2ef8b3/attachment.sig>


More information about the Openstack mailing list