A general tool for replicating distributed services

Summary form only given. The authors are designing and implementing a tool for making certain types of distributed services highly available through replication. The project has three separable goals: (1) to provide a tool for developing highly available services by exploiting semantics to get good performance. (2) to understand the issues in building a correct, easy-to-use, generic replication tool; and (3) to show that such a tool can indeed yield excellent performance in terms of availability and response time (relative to a nonreplicated service and relative to a hand-crafted replicated service)