US 11,902,083 B1
Techniques to provide a flexible witness in a distributed system
Shweta Manohar Behere, Milpitas, CA (US); Dhanesh Joshi, Cupertino, CA (US); Jonathan S. Gorlin, Denver, CO (US); Song Lu, San Jose, CA (US); and Sean Joseph Hagan, Wilton, CT (US)
Assigned to CISCO TECHNOLOGY, INC., San Jose, CA (US)
Filed by Cisco Technology, Inc., San Jose, CA (US)
Filed on Nov. 18, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/529,376.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/229,601, filed on Aug. 5, 2021.
Int. Cl. G06F 15/173 (2006.01); G06F 15/16 (2006.01); H04L 41/0604 (2022.01); H04L 67/1034 (2022.01); H04L 41/0654 (2022.01); H04L 67/133 (2022.01)
CPC H04L 41/0627 (2013.01) [H04L 41/0654 (2013.01); H04L 67/1034 (2013.01); H04L 67/133 (2022.05)] 21 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A system comprising:
one or more cluster sites each having at least two storage/compute nodes;
at least one local external device associated with at least one of the one or more cluster sites, the at least one local external device configured to run a local witness service; and
a central cloud management platform in communication with the one or more cluster sites, the central cloud management platform configured to run a cloud witness service, and to manage the local witness service and the cloud witness service;
wherein the local witness service and the cloud witness service are each configured to selectively perform identical arbitration services if a storage/compute node in one of the one or more cluster sites fails or communication between storage/compute nodes in a cluster fails, and wherein the local witness service and the cloud witness service are instantiations of a witness server and are selectively reachable via a uniform service interface that is configured to allow for deployment of the witness server on different types of computing platforms and portability of the witness server across the different types of computing platforms.