Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
SWIM: Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection Styl...
Search
Sponsored
·
Ship Features Fearlessly
Turn features on and off without deploys. Used by thousands of Ruby developers.
→
Paul Hinze
July 22, 2015
Technology
410
2
Share
Embed
Copy iframe code
Copy JS code
Copy link
Start on current slide
SWIM: Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection Style Process Group Membership Protocol
Papers We Love, Chicago
July 22, 2015
Paul Hinze
July 22, 2015
More Decks by Paul Hinze
See All by Paul Hinze
Getting Good at System Failure Analysis
phinze
0
480
Applying Graph Theory to Infrastructure As Code
phinze
6
2.2k
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Friends
phinze
2
340
Smoke & Mirrors: The Primitives of High Availability
phinze
1
770
Git: Everybody's Favorite MMO
phinze
0
220
Shut Up and Pipe! Unix-style Object Collaboration in Rack and Vagrant
phinze
0
190
Freighthop: Vagrant on Rails
phinze
0
340
Puppet Modules Are Our Friends
phinze
0
150
Who Needs Clouds?: HA in Your Datacenter
phinze
1
560
Other Decks in Technology
See All in Technology
感情と身体を置き去りにしない、エンジニアの生きのこり方 ──いまから、ここから「自分の状態」を扱うという選択
saorimurooka
0
340
アラート調査向けAIエージェントの本番導入とその後/AI Agents for Alert Investigation: Production Deployment and After
taddy_919
0
140
2026-06-24_人とAIの責務分離に基づく開発プロセスの提案.pdf
takahiromatsui
0
120
「ビジネスがわかるエンジニア」とは何か?
ryooob
0
310
コミュニティの有益性 ~JAWS Days 2026 での体験を通して~ / The Benefits of a Community ~Through My Experience at JAWS Days 2026~
seike460
PRO
0
270
【2026年版】 ベクトル検索とEmbedding最前線
mocobeta
24
7.6k
新しいUbuntu/GNOMEが使いたいからXからWaylandへ移行頑張ってるの巻 2026-06-20
nobutomurata
0
160
水を運ぶ人としてのリーダーシップ
izumii19
4
1k
Microsoft のサポートとフィードバック総まとめ
murachiakira
PRO
0
110
Zenoh on Zephyr on LiteX
takasehideki
2
110
AIチャット検索改善の3週間
kworkdev
PRO
2
170
When Platform Engineering Meets GenAI
sucitw
0
170
Featured
See All Featured
The MySQL Ecosystem @ GitHub 2015
samlambert
251
13k
SEO in 2025: How to Prepare for the Future of Search
ipullrank
3
3.5k
Navigating Weather and Climate Data
rabernat
0
230
How People are Using Generative and Agentic AI to Supercharge Their Products, Projects, Services and Value Streams Today
helenjbeal
1
220
StorybookのUI Testing Handbookを読んだ
zakiyama
31
6.8k
Building Experiences: Design Systems, User Experience, and Full Site Editing
marktimemedia
0
540
Agile Actions for Facilitating Distributed Teams - ADO2019
mkilby
0
210
Deep Space Network (abreviated)
tonyrice
0
210
Java REST API Framework Comparison - PWX 2021
mraible
34
9.4k
Winning Ecommerce Organic Search in an AI Era - #searchnstuff2025
aleyda
1
2.1k
The Limits of Empathy - UXLibs8
cassininazir
1
370
Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI
inesmontani
PRO
4
2.3k
Transcript
SWIM Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection Style Process Group Membership Protocol
Paul Hinze phinze
Paul Hinze phinze death stare
Armon Dadgar armon creator of Serf and Consul
ma
None
None
Process Group Membership Protocol Who is alive
None
Process Group Membership Protocol
SWIM Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection Style Process Group Membership Protocol
Scalable The SWIM effort is motivated by the unscalability of
traditional heartbeating protocols.
Heartbeating A B C A A B B Failure Detection
+ Membership
Heartbeating
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead heartbeating Yes Limit *
Interval High Nodes2 !
Key Insight Failure Detection State Updates. Solve separately from
Failure Detection ping! ack! A B C D {B,C,D}
Failure Detection ping! ack! A B C D {B,C,D}
Indirect Ping ping(C)! ack! B C D ping(C)! ping ack
fail {B,C,D}
Indirect Ping ping(C)! B C D ping(C)! fail ...C is
dead! fail
Key Insight Failure Detection State Updates. Solve separately from
Key Insight State Updates Failure Detection Piggyback onto messages.
State Updates ping! (B is dead) ack! (D just joined)
A B C D {B,C} {D}
Infection Style A B C D {B,C} {A,B,D} {A,B} weakly
consistent
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead SWIM Yes, eventually 1
* Interval High-ish O(N)
Improvements Time Bounded Completeness Increased Accuracy
Completeness A B {B, C, D, ..., N} N
Completeness A B {B, C, D, ..., N} N 1.
Shuffle List 2. Iterate
Completeness Fixed Time
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead SWIM Yes, fixed time
1 * Interval High-ish O(N)
Accuracy B C D ...C is MAYBE dead! A
Accuracy B C D I heard C might be dead.
A
Accuracy B C D I'm not dead! A
Accuracy
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead SWIM Yes, fixed time
1 * Interval High O(N)
Evaluating Protocols Completeness Speed Accuracy Overhead SWIM Yes, fixed time
1 * Interval High O(N)
None
Limitations Update Latency Problem Solution Separate Gossip Timer
Limitations Cannot Handle Network Partitions Problem Solution Track and Retry
Recently Dead Nodes
Limitations No Concept of Graceful Leave (vs Failure) Problem Solution
Broadcast and Tracking of "Intents"
Limitations New Nodes Take Too Long Materialize Initial State Problem
Solution Anti-entropy TCP State Syncs
Limitations No built-in facility for user data Problem Solution Implement
user payloads (ordering via lamport clocks)
Limitations No peer metadata, only IP Addresses Problem Solution Inject
versioned peer metadata into state messages
Limitations No encryption Problem Solution Implement AES-GCM with key rotation
56 nodes 2K nodes Performance
Implementations Memberlist https://github.com/hashicorp/memberlist Serf lib https://github.com/hashicorp/serf Serf http://www.serfdom.io Consul http://www.consul.io
Implementations events, queries, and scripts serf CLI serf lib memberlist
Implementations service discovery, K/V, health checks consul serf lib memberlist
Implementations service discovery, K/V, health checks
Thanks Cloud icons by Julien Deveaux from the Noun Project