Title: Middleware-managed high availability for cloud applications

Authors: Ali Kanso; Abdelouahed Gherbi; Yves Lemieux

Addresses: IBM T.J. Watson Research, USA ' Department of Software and IT Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS), Montreal, Canada ' Ericsson Research Ericsson Inc., Montreal, Canada

Abstract: High availability is a key non-functional requirement that software and telecom service providers strive to achieve. With the ongoing shift to cloud computing, the challenges of satisfying the high availability requirement become more arduous, as the cloud introduces additional features, such as on-demand access, scalability, virtualisation, which add to the complexity of the high availability solution. In this article, we target the issue of achieving high availability for the software applications running in the cloud. We first benchmark two of the most prominent middleware implementations for HA. We then build on the most responsive one to present our solution to address the complexity issue of applications high availability deployed in the cloud. Finally, we discuss a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the overhead of our proposed solution.

Keywords: high availability; cloud platform; HA middleware; state-aware applications; runtime integration; high availability as a service; REST architecture.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2018.089031

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2018 Vol.12 No.1/2, pp.186 - 208

Received: 01 Jun 2016
Accepted: 04 Oct 2016
Published online: 04 Jan 2018 *

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