Scalable leadership election in a multi-processing computing environment

A method comprising:

• receiving, at a witness process on a first node in a first fault domain, a request from a second node in a second fault domain to become an owner of a resource shared across the second fault domain and a third fault domain, wherein a third node in the third fault domain was previously established as the owner of the resource using the witness process and the witness process maintains an ownership state for the resource and the second and third fault domains are at different sites accessible over a network;
• determining that the second node in the second fault domain should become the owner of the resource;
• transmitting an authorization from the witness process on the first node to the second node granting ownership of the resource to the second node to become a new owner of the resource;
• and
• updating the ownership state for the resource at the witness process on the first node, wherein the new owner of the resource communicates a copy of storage changes to both a fault domain of a follower node and the second fault domain of the second node.

A system comprising:

• a non-transitory storage medium having stored thereon a sequence of instructions;
• and
• a processor that executes the sequence of instructions to perform a set of acts comprising:
• receiving, at a witness process on a first node in a first fault domain, a request from a second node in a second fault domain to become an owner of a resource shared across the second fault domain and a third fault domain, wherein a third node in the third fault domain was previously established as the owner of the resource using the witness process and the witness process maintains an ownership state for the resource and the second and third fault domains are at different sites accessible over a network;
• determining that the second node in the second fault domain should become the owner of the resource;
• transmitting an authorization from the witness process on the first node to the second node granting ownership of the resource to the second node;
• and
• updating the ownership state for the resource at the witness process on the first node;
• transmitting an authorization from the witness process on the first node to the second node granting ownership of the resource to the second node to become a new owner of the resource;
• and
• updating the ownership state for the resource at the witness process on the first node, wherein the new owner of the resource communicates a copy of storage changes to both a fault domain of a follower node and the second fault domain of the second node.