SeeMoRe: A Fault-Tolerant Protocol for Hybrid Cloud Environments

Large scale data management systems utilize State Machine Replication to provide fault tolerance and to enhance performance. Fault-tolerant protocols are extensively used in the distributed database infrastructure of large enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. However, and in spite of years of intensive research, existing fault-tolerant protocols do not adequately address hybrid cloud environments consisting of private and public clouds which are widely used by enterprises. In this paper, we consider a private cloud consisting of nonmalicious nodes (crash-only failures) and a public cloud with possible malicious failures. We introduce SeeMoRe, a hybrid State Machine Replication protocol that uses the knowledge of where crash and malicious failures may occur in a public/private cloud environment to improve overall performance. SeeMoRe has three different modes that can be used depending on the private cloud load and the communication latency between the public and private clouds. SeeMoRe can dynamically transition from one mode to another. Furthermore, an extensive evaluation reveals that SeeMoRe’s performance is close to the state of the art crash fault-tolerant protocols while tolerating malicious failures.