Rollup: Non-Disruptive Rolling Upgrade with Fast Consensus-Based Dynamic Reconfigurations

Rolling upgrade consists of upgrading progressively the servers of a distributed system to reduce service downtime.Upgrading a subset of servers requires a well-engineered cluster membership protocol to maintain, in the meantime, the availability of the system state. Existing cluster membership reconfigurations, like CoreOS etcd, rely on a primary not only for reconfiguration but also for storing information. At any moment, there can be at most one primary, whose replacement induces disruption. We propose Rollup, a non-disruptive rolling upgrade protocol with a fast consensus-based reconfiguration. Rollup relies on a candidate leader only for the reconfiguration and scalable biquorums for service requests. While Rollup implements a non-disruptive cluster membership protocol, it does not offer a full-fledged coordination service. We analyzed Rollup theoretically and experimentally on an isolated network of 26 physical machines and an Amazon EC2 cluster of 59 virtual machines. Our results show an 8-fold speedup compared to a rolling upgrade based on a primary for reconfiguration.