Constructing dependable Web services

The majority of today´s millions of Web sites offer read-only access to relatively small amounts of infrequently changing information. The load on these sites is usually small, and services can often be hosted as background tasks on general-purpose workstations. Concern for the quality of service (QoS) presented to users at these sites is generally not primary. Conversely, a much smaller number of sites are very popular; they support heavy loads and must meet user expectations regarding QoS to maintain their popularity. We discuss issues involved in supporting high-volume, high-reliability Web services. We begin by surveying the diverse technical challenges and constraints posed in this environment, followed by currently used hardware and network based approaches to meeting the scalability requirements and software-implemented techniques to addressing fault tolerance. However, these approaches do not scale well, so we discuss possible alternatives