WS-replication: a framework for highly available web services

ABSTRACT

Due to the rapid acceptance of web services and its fast spreading, a number of mission-critical systems will be deployed as web services in next years. The availability of those systems must be guaranteed in case of failures and network disconnections. An example of web services for which availability will be a crucial issue are those belonging to coordination web service infrastructure, such as web services for transactional coordination (e.g., WS-CAF and WS-Transaction). These services should remain available despite site and connectivity failures to enable business interactions on a 24x7 basis. Some of the common techniques for attaining availability consist in the use of a clustering approach. However, in an Internet setting a domain can get partitioned from the network due to a link overload or some other connectivity problems. The unavailability of a coordination service impacts the availability of all the partners in the business process. That is, coordination services are an example of critical components that need higher provisions for availability. In this paper, we address this problem by providing an infrastructure, WS-Replication, for WAN replication of web services. The infrastructure is based on a group communication web service, WS-Multicast, that respects the web service autonomy. The transport of WS-Multicast is based on SOAP and relies exclusively on web service technology for interaction across organizations. We have replicated WS-CAF using our WS-Replication framework and evaluated its performance.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Client/server
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability; Fault tolerance

  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Transaction processing

General Terms:
Performance, Reliability

Keywords:
WS-CAF, availability, group communication, transactions, web services