A fault tolerant architecture for web services

Abstract

Web services are increasingly used to integrate and build business application on the internet. Failure of web services is not acceptable in many situations such as online banking, so fault tolerance is a key challenge of web services. Web service architecture still lacks facilities to support fault tolerance. This paper proposes a fault tolerant architecture for web services by increasing the reliability and availability, the architecture is based on application-level and transport-level logging of requests and replies, N-Version and active replication techniques. The proposed architecture is client transparent and provides fault tolerance even for requests being processed at the time of server failure.