System support for scalable and fault tolerant Internet services

Abstract

Over the past few years, we have seen the proliferation of Internet-based services ranging from search engines and map services to video-on-demand servers. All of these kinds of services need to be able to provide guarantees of availability and scalability to their users. With millions of users on the Internet today, these services must have the capacity to handle a large number of clients and remain available even in the face of extremely high load. In this paper, we present a generic architecture for supporting such Internet applications. We provide a substrate for Scalable Network Services (SNS), on top of which application developers can design their services without worrying about the details of service management. We back our design with three real-world services: a web distillation proxy, a proxy-based web-browser for PDAs, and an MBone archive server.