Distributed Move Protocol: How to Safely Relocate State Across Systems
Moving state between distributed systems is far more complex than a simple copy-and-delete operation, as it introduces risks like duplicate, missing, or partial visibility of data. These risks are amplified by retries, crashes, and concurrent operations, making them core protocol requirements rather than edge cases. A safe distributed move protocol follows a structured sequence — reserve, prepare, transfer, verify, finalize, retire, and recover — ensuring the destination is fully prepared before becoming visible and the source is only retired after the destination is authoritative. Two key guarantees must hold: the source must never disappear before the destination is live, and both source and destination must never appear simultaneously as active states. If the system crashes at any stage, a recovery mechanism inspects the recorded protocol state and retries the last safe idempotent step until the move is complete.
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