CORAL: A transparent fault-tolerant web service

The Web is increasingly used for critical applications and services. We present a client-transparent mechanism, called CORAL, that provides high reliability and availability for Web service. CORAL provides fault tolerance even for requests being processed at the time of server failure. The scheme does not require deterministic servers and can thus handle dynamic content. CORAL actively replicates the TCP connection state while maintaining logs of HTTP requests and replies. In the event of a primary server failure, active client connections fail over to a spare, where their processing continues seamlessly. We describe key aspects of the design and implementation as well as several performance optimizations. Measurements of system overhead, failover performance, and preliminary validation using fault injection are presented. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.