Decentralized bootstrapping in clouds

One of the challenges of deploying distributed systems, is the difficulty for nodes and services to find one another (commonly called bootstrapping). There has been extensive research on the topic, resulting in solutions based on broadcasting/multicasting, rendezvous servers and domain name based service discoveries among others. Still, currently deployed solutions generally are centralized or have some failure-sensitive points. This paper presents a completely decentralized solution based on the random address probing algorithm, with different extensions to both circumvent some of the shortcoming of the baseline algorithm as well as take advantage of the environmental specifics of cloud architectures.