Research: Robustness in Complex Systems

While the network engineering world tends to use the word resilience to describe a system that will support rapid change in the real world, another word often used in computer science is robustness. What makes a system robust or resilient? If you ask a network engineer this question, the most likely answer you will get is something like there is no single point of failure. This common answer, however, does not go “far enough” in describing resilience. For instance, it is at least sometimes the case that adding more redundancy into a network can actually harm MTTR. A simple example: adding more links in parallel can cause the control plane to converge more slowly; at some point, the time to converge can be reduced enough to offset the higher path availability.

In other cases, automating the response to a change in the network can harm MTTR. For instance, we often nail a static route up and redistribute that, rather than redistributing live routing information between protocols. Experience shows that sometimes not reacting automatically is better than reacting automatically.

This post will look at a paper that examines robustness more deeply, Robustness in Complexity Systems, by Steven Gribble. While this is an older paper—it was written in 2000—it remains a worthwhile read for the lessons in distributed system design. The paper is based on the deployment of a cluster based Distributed Data Structure (DDS). A more convenient way for readers to think of this is as a distributed database. Several problems discovered when building and deploying this DDS are considered, including—

• A problem with garbage collection, which involved timeouts. The system was designed to allocate memory as needed to form and synchronize records. After the record had been synchronized, any unneeded memory would be released, but would not be reallocated immediately by some other process. Rather, a garbage collection routine would coalesce memory into larger blocks where possible, rearranging items and placing memory back into available pools. This process depends on a timer. What the developers discovered is their initial “guess” at a a good timer was ultimately an order of a magnitude too small, causing some of the nodes to “fall behind” other nodes in their synchronization. Once a node fell behind, the other nodes in the system were required to “take up the slack,” causing them to fail at some point in the future. This kind of cascading failure, triggered by a simple timer setting, is common in a distributed system.
• A problem with a leaky abstraction from TCP into the transport. The system was designed to attempt to connect on TCP, and used fairly standard timeouts for building TCP connections. However, a firewall in the network was set to disallow inbound TCP sessions. Another process connecting on TCP was passing through this firewall, causing the TCP session connection to fail, and, in turn, causing the TCP stack on the nodes to block for 15 minutes. This interaction of different components caused nodes to fall out of availability for long periods of time.

Gribble draws several lessons from these, and other, outages in the system.

First, he states that for a system to be truly robust, it must use some form of admission control. The load on the system, in other words, must somehow be controlled so more work cannot be given than the system can support. This has been a contentious issue in network engineering. While circuit switched networks can control the amount of work offered to the network (hence a Clos can be non-blocking in a circuit switched network), admission control in a packet switched network is almost impossible. The best you can do is some form of Quality of Service marking and dropping, such as traffic shaping or traffic policing, along the edge. This does highlight the importance of such controls, however.

Second, he states that systems must be systematically overprovisioned. This comes back to the point about redundant links. The caution above, however, still applies; systematic overprovisioning needs to be balanced against other tools to build a robust system. Far too often, overprovisioning is treated as “the only tool in the toolbox.”

Third, he states introspection must be built into the system. The system must be designed to be monitorable from its inception. In network engineering, this kind of thinking is far too often taken to say “everything must be measurable.” This does not go far enough. Network engineers need to think about not only how to measure, but also what they expect normal to look like, and how to tell when “normal” is no longer “normal.” The system must be designed within limits. Far too often, we just build “as large as possible,” and run it to see what happens.

Fourth, Gribbles says adaptivity must be provided through a closed control loop. This is what we see in routing protocols, in the sense that the control plane reacts to topology changes in a specific way, or rather within a specific state machine. Learning this part of the network is a crucial, but often skimmed over, part of network engineering.

This is an excellent paper, well worth reading for those who are interested in classic work around the area of robustness and distributed systems.