SHADOW: Seamless Handoff And Zero-Downtime Orchestrated Workload Migration for Stateful Microservices

TL;DR

SHADOW is a Kubernetes-native framework that enables zero-downtime migration of stateful microservices by using shadow pods and message replay, significantly reducing migration time and eliminating service downtime.

Contribution

It introduces the ShadowPod strategy and ExchangeFence mechanism for seamless, message-loss-free workload migration in Kubernetes.

Findings

Reduces restore phase by up to 92%.

Eliminates service downtime during migration.

Reduces total migration time by up to 77%.

Abstract

Migrating stateful microservices in Kubernetes requires careful state management because in-memory state is lost when a container restarts. For StatefulSet-managed workloads, the problem is compounded by identity constraints that prohibit two pods with the same ordinal from running simultaneously, forcing a sequential stop-recreate cycle with a median 38.5s of service downtime. This paper presents SHADOW Seamless Handoff And Zero-Downtime Orchestrated Workload Migration, a Kubernetes-native framework that implements the Message-based Stateful Microservice Migration (MS2M) approach as a Kubernetes Operator. SHADOW introduces the ShadowPod strategy, where a shadow pod is created from a CRIU checkpoint image on the target node while the source pod continues serving traffic, allowing concurrent operation during message replay. For StatefulSet workloads, an identity swap procedure with the ExchangeFence mechanism re-checkpoints the shadow pod, creates a StatefulSet-owned replacement, and drains both message queues to guarantee zero message loss during the handoff. An evaluation on a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster with 280 migration runs across four configurations and seven message rates (10--120msg/s) shows that, compared to the sequential baseline on the same StatefulSet workload, the ShadowPod strategy reduces the restore phase by up to 92%, eliminates service downtime entirely, and reduces total migration time by up to 77%, with zero message loss across all 280 runs.