An Autonomic Approach for Replication of Internet-based Services

Abstract

As more and more applications are deployed as Internet-based services, they have to be available anytime anywhere in a seamless manner. This requires the underlying infrastructure to provide scalability, fault tolerance and fast response times. While replicating the services and the data they access across sites that are located in different geographic regions is a promising means to achieve these requirements, data consistency is challenging if data continuously changes and queries are dynamic by nature, as is typical for e-commerce applications.Thus, current WAN replication solutions either trade performance for data consistency or are notable to scale in wide-area settings. In this paper, we present a novel approach to provide performance and consistency for Internet services. One of the main contributions is an autonomic replica placement module that places data copies only on servers close to clients that actually need them. The goal is to find the right trade-off between fast local access and the overhead of keeping data copies consistent. As data access patterns might change over time, reconfiguration is done periodically and online, i.e., allowing sites to receive new data copies or drop data copies while at the same time transaction processing continues in the system.