Proteus: A Flexible Infrastructure to Implement Adaptive Fault Tolerance in AQuA

Building dependable distributed systems from commercial off-the-shelf components is of growing practical importance. For both cost and production reasons, there is interest in approaches and architectures that facilitate building such systems. The AQuA architecture is one such approach; its goal is to provide adaptive fault tolerance to CORBA applications by replicating objects, providing a high-level method for applications to specify their desired dependability, and providing a dependability manager that attempts to reconfigure a system at runtime so that dependability requests are satisfied. This paper describes how dependability is provided in AQuA. In particular, we describe Proteus, the part of AQuA that dynamically manages replicated distributed objects to make them dependable. Given a dependability request, Proteus chooses a fault tolerance approach and reconfigures the system to try to meet the request. The infrastructure of Proteus is described in this paper, along with its use in implementing active replication and a simple dependability policy.