Sloppy Management of Structured P2P Services

The traditional way to manage distributed systems software is to list all possible error conditions such as churn and partial node or network failures, and come up with repair algorithms that take care of maintaining the desired structure despite adversary conditions. However, implementing repair algorithms is cumbersome, and any error can potentially lead to complex liveness bugs. In this context, our position is that explicit repair algorithms can and should be avoided in the implementation of structured peer-to-peer services. Instead, we should use continuous lazy background algorithms to handle non-functional management tasks such as routing table maintenance, while relying on the original structured algorithms for the functional tasks such as routing messages through a DHT.