A Middleware for Exactly-Once Semantics in Request-Response Interactions

Authors

Abstract

Although the need for the exactly-once request-response interaction
pattern is ubiquitous in distributed systems, making it work in practice
is anything but simple. Ensuring the at-most-once part of the invocation
is relatively easy. Unfortunately, the same is not true for the at-least-once
guarantee, which depends on the recovery from crashes of the client, the server
and the network. This is what
makes the exactly-once interaction so difficult in practice: client
and server must log their actions into stable storage, and they must
be able to restart the network connections.

In this paper, we present a middleware that implements the exactly-once request-response pattern, in presence of network and endpoints
crashes. The main contribution of our work is to release the programmer from the complex tasks of recovering from message losses and network crashes.

Subject

Distributed Systems

Related Project

TRONE: Trustworthy and Resilient Operations in a Network Environment (CMU-PT/RNQ/0015/2009)

Conference

18th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 2012), November 2012

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DOI