Performant and Resilient Service Composition for Modern Cloud Applications

Modern cloud applications are often distributed systems composed from vendor-provided building blocks (e.g., object storage services, container orchestration services). Consequently, distributed fault-tolerance is a central concern for application correctness. Although each building block may offer individual fault-tolerance, the end-to-end application is still susceptible to failures, because the composition logic that orchestrates them may still fail. This thesis explores resilient composition, a systematic way to assemble fault-tolerant components into resilient end-to-end distributed applications. We begin by presenting the fail-restart system model, which captures the unique fault-tolerance challenges that arise when composing services. Based on this model, we define Composable Resilient Steps (CReSt), an atomic programming abstraction that guarantees fault-tolerance across the assembled application. We then detail efficient methods for implementing CReSt using a range of database techniques, and a novel distributed protocol that allow optimistic, speculative execution ahead of slower fault-tolerance safeguards. Together, these pieces allow developers to assemble fault-tolerant distributed systems that are correct by construction and often more performant than existing solutions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Li, Tianyu

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Madden, Samuel R.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/164049

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/164049