Reliable State Machines: A Framework for Programming Reliable Cloud Services

Building reliable applications for the cloud is challenging because of unpredictable failures during a program\u27s execution. This paper presents a programming framework, called Reliable State Machines (RSMs), that offers fault-tolerance by construction. In our framework, an application comprises several (possibly distributed) RSMs that communicate with each other via messages, much in the style of actor-based programming. Each RSM is fault-tolerant by design, thereby offering the illusion of being "always-alive". An RSM is guaranteed to process each input request exactly once, as one would expect in a failure-free environment. The RSM runtime automatically takes care of persisting state and rehydrating it on a failover. We present the core syntax and semantics of RSMs, along with a formal proof of failure-transparency. We provide a .NET implementation of the RSM framework for deploying services to Microsoft Azure. We carry out an extensive performance evaluation on micro-benchmarks to show that one can build high-throughput applications with RSMs. We also present a case study where we rewrite a significant part of a production cloud service using RSMs. The resulting service has simpler code and exhibits production-grade performance