A History of the Virtual Synchrony Replication Model

A "Cloud Computing" revolution is underway, supported by massive data centers that often contain thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of servers. In such systems, scalability is the mantra and this, in turn, compels application developers to replicate various forms of information. By replicating the data needed to handle client requests, many services can be spread over a cluster to exploit parallelism. Servers also use replication to implement high availability and fault-tolerance mechanisms, ensure low latency, implement caching, and provide distributed management and control. On the other hand, replication is hard to implement, hence developers typically turn to standard replication solutions, packaged as sharable libraries.