Large-scale distributed systems in Cloud datacenter are capable of provisioning service to consumers with diverse business requirements. Providers face pressure to provision uninterrupted reliable services while reducing operational costs due to significant software and hardware failures. A widely used means to achieve such a goal is using redundant system components to implement usertransparent failover, yet its effectiveness must be balanced carefully without incurring heavy overhead when deployed – an important practical consideration for complex large-scale systems. Failover techniques developed for Cloud systems often suffer serious limitations, including mandatory restart leading to poor cost-effectiveness, as well as solely focusing on crash failures, omitting other important types, e.g. timing failures and simultaneous failures. This paper addresses these limitations by presenting a new approach to user-transparent failover for massive-scale systems. The approach uses soft-state inference to achieve rapid failure recovery and avoid unnecessary restart, with minimal system resource overhead. It also copes with different failures, including correlated and simultaneous events. The proposed approach was implemented, deployed and evaluated within Fuxi system, the underlying resource management system used within Alibaba Cloud. Results demonstrate that our approach tolerates complex failure scenarios while incurring at worst 228.5 microsecond instance overhead with 1.71% additional CPU usage.
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