Reconfiguring Replicated Atomic Storage: A Tutorial

We live in a world of Internet services such as email, social networks, web searching, and more, which must store increasingly larger volumes of data. These services must run on cheap infrastructure, hence they must use distributed storage systems; and they have to provide reliability of data for long periods as well as availability, hence they must support online reconfiguration to remove failed nodes and add healthy ones. The knowledge needed to implement online reconfiguration is subtle and simple techniques often fail to work well. This tutorial provides an introductory overview of this topic, including a description of the main technical challenges, as well as the various approaches that are used to address these challenges.