Replicating CORBA Objects: a marriage between active and passive replication

Replication is a key mechanism for developing fault-tolerant and highly available applications. In this paper, we present a replication framework for replicating CORBA objects, that combines the active and passive replication techniques. We show how we have used axiomatic properties of a consensus protocol together with a generic architectural framework to bridge the gap between active and passive replication. Our framework makes it possible to dynamically associate replication techniques to individual operations of a replicated object, without requiring the client to even know that the object is replicated. Augmenting CORBA with a replication service is a big step towards reliable and interoperable distributed systems. KEYWORDS replication, CORBA, fault tolerance, high availability