A Container-Based Approach to Fault Tolerance in Service-Oriented Architectures

This paper introduces an innovative approach to improving service availability and reliability. Central to the approach taken are what the author calls fault tolerant service containers. These 'contain' externally provided services and in doing so add fault tolerance to them. This is achieved by allowing the container to be configured with a policy which specifies what kind of fault tolerance mechanisms may be applied to the services it contains. The container proxies calls to its services, passing them on to replicas in a pattern determined by the specified policy. A tool and SDK simplify the creation and deployment of the container and its policy. The paper concludes that, as it stands, this architecture provides a consistent mechanism for achieving certain kinds of fault tolerance.