arrow
Return

Consistent Updates for Scalable Microservices

delete2026-01-01
delete0
PRE
AI
D
Devora Chait-Roth *
K
Kedar S. Namjoshi
T
Thomas Wies
DOI:10.1145/3776700delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Online services are commonly implemented with a scalable microservice architecture, where isomorphic workers process client requests, recording persistent state in a backend data store. To maintain service, modifications to service functionality must be made on the fly-i.e., as the service continues to process client requests-but doing so is challenging. The central difficulty is that of avoiding inconsistencies from mixed-mode operation, caused by workers of current and new versions interacting via the data store. Some update methods avoid mixed-mode altogether, but only at the cost of substantial inefficiency-by doubling resources (memory and compute), or by halving throughput. The alternative is an uncontrolled rolling update, which runs the risk of serious service failures arising from inconsistent mixed-mode behavior. Ideally, it should appear to every client that a service update takes effect atomically; this ensures that a client is not exposed to inconsistent mixed-mode behavior. In this paper, we introduce a framework that formalizes this intuition and develop foundational theory for reasoning about update consistency. We apply this theory to derive the first algorithms that guarantee consistency for mixed-mode updates. The algorithms rely on semantic properties of service actions, such as commutativity. We show that this is unavoidable, by proving that any semantically oblivious mixed-mode update method must allow inconsistencies.
Keywords:
On-the-Fly Update
Dynamic Software Update
Rolling Update
Microservices
Consistency

Journal

P
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages-PACMPL
IF:
2.8
Papers:
308
Citations:
4.7K

Organization

N
new york university
Scholars:
6.1K
Papers: 2.9K
Citations: 1
N
nokia corporation
Scholars:
1.8K
Papers: 1.5K
Citations: 1