Transparent Symmetric Active/Active Replication for Service-Level High Availability

As service-oriented architectures become more important in parallel and distributed computing systems, individual service instance reliability as well as appropriate service redundancy becomes an essential necessity in order to increase overall system availability. This paper focuses on providing redundancy strategies using service-level replication techniques. Based on previous research using symmetric active/active replication, this paper proposes a transparent symmetric active/active replication approach that allows for more reuse of code between individual service-level replication implementations by using a virtual communication layer. Service- and client-side interceptors are utilized in order to provide total transparency. Clients and servers are unaware of the replication infrastructure as it provides all necessary mechanisms internally.