Abstract
In this paper we are concerned with the live verification of the consistency of a replicated system, an issue that has not been addressed by the research community so far. We consider the problem of how to enable the system to detect automatically and in production whether the invariants defining the correctness of object replication are violated. This feature could greatly improve the dependability of distributed applications and is necessary for constructing self-managing and self-healing replicated systems. We focus on systems that enforce strongly consistent replication: all replicas of each object must be kept “continuously” in-sync. This replication strategy is appropriate for application domains where correctness guarantees in spite of failures are more important than performance and scalability. We present the design and implementation of a replicated web service capable of self-checking whether all replicas are indeed kept in sync. This check occurs on-line, transparently to clients. We also discuss the performance cost of self-checking in our prototype.
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Alberto Bartoli is Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Trieste, Italy. He took a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1989 and a doctorate in Computer Engineering in 1994, both at the University of Pisa, Italy. His research interests are in the area of reliability and fault-tolerance in distributed systems.
Giovanni Masarin took a degree in Electronic Engineering in 2004, at the University of Trieste, Italy. He is currently involved in product development at RadioTrevisan, a company specialized in the production of lawful interception equipments.
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Bartoli, A., Masarin, G. On-line self-checking of replication consistency for autonomic computing. Cluster Comput 9, 449–463 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-0012-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-0012-5