Automatic Replication for Highly Available Services

Abstract

Replicating various components of a system is a common technique for providing highly available services in the presence of failures. A replication scheme is a mechanism for organizing these replicas so that as a group they provide a service that has the same semantics as the original unreplicated service. Viewstamped replication is a new replication scheme for providing high availability. This thesis describes an implementation of viewstamped replication in the context of the Argus programming language and run-time system. The programmer writes an Argus program to provide a service without worrying about availability. The run-time system automatically replicates the service using the viewstamped replication scheme,and therefore makes the service highly available. Performance measurements indicate that this method allows a program to be made highly available without degradation of performance. Keywords: Replication, Availability, Transactions, Nested transactions, Viewstamped replicati..