Dynamic Software Updates using CRDTs

Abstract

This paper investigates how Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) can be used for dynamic software updates of distributed applications. We propose to model application updates as a new App CRDT that stores the application code associated with a semantic version, which defines a total order of the code updates. The App CRDT works with an API-compatible message delivery middleware, which allows applications to continue working with partially updated components in the face of backwards-incompatible software updates. We implemented our approach in AmbientTalk, an ambient-oriented programming language designed for distributed systems. We show how this CRDT can be integrated with existing AmbientTalk applications, requiring minimal changes. We also implemented our approach in LuAT, an ambient-oriented programming framework for Lua. This shows that our approach of using CRDTs to replicate code can be generalised to other programming languages.