Abstract Modern distributed services increasingly execute on thousands or more machines, while delivering services to millions of users. These scales are in stark contrast to that of traditional distributed systems by several orders of magnitude, and question the traditional engineering approach used to construct distributed systems. In particular, as systems continue to grow and to integrate diverse and partly autonomous subsystems, deciding beforehand on a static system architecture becomes increasingly difficult. Self-organizing mechanisms become in this case particularly useful. In this lecture, we will discuss the main challenges of self-organization in large-scale systems, and present some representative examples of epidemic-based self-organizing protocols and their application. |
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