Zero Downtime Release: Disruption-free Load Balancing of a Multi-Billion User Website

Modern network infrastructure has evolved into a complex organism to satisfy the performance and availability requirements for the billions of users. Frequent releases such as code upgrades, bug fixes and security updates have become a norm. Millions of globally distributed infrastructure components including servers and load-balancers are restarted frequently from multiple times per-day to per-week. However, every release brings possibilities of disruptions as it can result in reduced cluster capacity, disturb intricate interaction of the components operating at large scales and disrupt the end-users by terminating their connections. The challenge is further complicated by the scale and heterogeneity of supported services and protocols.

In this paper, we leverage different components of the end-toend networking infrastructure to prevent or mask any disruptions in face of releases. Zero Downtime Release is a collection of mechanisms used at Facebook to shield the end-users from any disruptions, preserve the cluster capacity and robustness of the infrastructure when updates are released globally. Our evaluation shows that these mechanisms prevent any significant cluster capacity degradation when a considerable number of productions servers and proxies are restarted and minimizes the disruption for different services (notably TCP, HTTP and publish/subscribe).