Towards a Dependable Architecture for Highly Available Internet Services

For an improved QoS provisioning, operators are strongly concerned both with the availability and the reliability of their performance critical servers. Among these entities, we mention the firewalls used to filter the offered network traffic to the operator´s information system as well as the end processing servers which service each incoming client request. In this work, we advocate and evaluate a full architecture for highly available services. Performance evaluations show that our proposed framework incurs a minimal overhead to the end-to-end communications during failsafe periods and performs well during failures.