Abstract

Current and future Internet services will provide a large, rapidly evolving, highly accessed, yet autonomously managed information space. Internet news, perhaps, is the closest existing precursor to such services. It permits autonomous updates, is replicated at thousands of autonomously managed sites, and manages a large database. It gets its performance through massive replication. This paper proposes a scalable mechanism for replicating wide-area, autonomously managed services. We target replication degrees of tens of thousands of weakly consistent replicas. For efficiency, our mechanism probes the network and computes a good logical topology over which to send updates. For scalability, we organize replicas into hierarchical replication groups, analogous to the Internet's autonomous routing domains. We argue that efficient, massive replication does not have to rely on internet multicast.

Citations