  Globalized computing infrastructures offer the convenience and elasticity of
globally managed objects and services, but lack the resilience to distant
failures that localized infrastructures such as private clouds provide.
Providing both global management and resilience to distant failures, however,
poses a fundamental problem for configuration services: How to discover a
possibly migratory, strongly-consistent service/object in a globalized
infrastructure without dependencies on globalized state? Limix is the first
metadata configuration service that addresses this problem. With Limix, global
strongly-consistent data-plane services and objects are insulated from remote
gray failures by ensuring that the definitive, strongly-consistent metadata for
any object is always confined to the same region as the object itself. Limix
guarantees availability bounds: any user can continue accessing any strongly
consistent object that matters to the user located at distance $\Delta$ away,
insulated from failures outside a small multiple of $\Delta$. We built a Limix
metadata service based on CockroachDB. Our experiments on Internet-like
networks and on AWS, using realistic trace-driven workloads, show that Limix
enables global management and significantly improves availability over the
state-of-the-art.
