A highly available scalable ITV system

Abstract

As part of Time Warner's interactive TV trial in Orlando, Florida, we have implemented mechanisms for the construction of highly available and scalable system services and applications. Our mechanisms rely on an underlying distributed objects architecture, similar to Spring[1]. We have extended a standard name service interface to provide selectors for choosing among service replicas and auditing to allow the automatic detection and removal of unresponsive objects from the name space. In addition, our system supports resource recovery, by letting servers detect client failures, and automated restart of failed services. Our experience has been that these mechanisms greatly simplify the development of services that are both highly available and scalable. The system was built in less than 15 months, is currently in a small number of homes, and will support the trial's 4,000 users later this year.