Towards Continuous Availability of Internet Services through Availability Domains

The increasing number of Internet users has caused a dramatic increase in electronic commerce. This growth is outpacing technologies for dependability causing traditional views of high availability to come under question. In particular, Internet failures are a phenomenon external to the owner of a commerce site that must be dealt with, and therefore, geographically distributed servers are a basic availability requirement for e-commerce sites. Geographic distribution provides an opportunity to view users in different roles based on those distributed components they must access. This paper presents an approach based on partitioning on-line function into domains, each of which provides service to users in a specific role. Coordination between domains is eliminated as much as possible by exploting application-specific knowledge. Once partitioned, availability techniques may be applied to each domain independently. We argue such an approach is necessary to deal with the geographic distri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DSN
• Authors: Nicholas S. Bowen, Daniel C. Sturman, Tina Ting Liu
• Keywords: Availability, Basic Availability Requirement, Computer Networks, DSN 2000, Geographic Distribution