SWIM: The scalable membership protocol
In a distributed system we have a group of nodes that need to collaborate and
send messages to each other. To achieve that they need to first answer a simple
question: Who are my peers?
That’s what membership protocols do. They help each node in this system to
maintain a list of nodes that are alive, notifying them when a new node joins
the group, when someone intentionally leaves and when a node dies (or at least
appears to be dead). SWIM
, or Scalable Weakly-consistent
Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol, is one of these
protocols.