Microsoft Corporation
Quorum based transactionally consistent membership management in distributed storage

Abstract:

Systems and methods that restore a failed reconfiguration of nodes in a distributed environment. By analyzing reports from read/write quorums of nodes associated with a configuration, automatic recovery for data partitions can be facilitated. Moreover, a configuration manager component tracks current configurations for replication units and determines whether a reconfiguration is required (e.g., due to node failures, node recovery, replica additions/deletions, replica moves, or replica role changes, and the like.) Reconfigurations of data activated as being replicated from an old configuration to being replicated on a new configuration may be performed in a transactionally consistent manner based on dynamic quorums associated with the new configuration and the old configuration.