Title
High-availability clusters: A taxonomy, survey, and future directions
Abstract
The delivery of key services in domains ranging from finance and manufacturing to healthcare and transportation is underpinned by a rapidly growing number of mission-critical enterprise applications. Ensuring the continuity of these complex applications requires the use of software-managed infrastructures called high-availability clusters (HACs). HACs employ sophisticated techniques to monitor the health of key enterprise application layers and of the resources they use, and to seamlessly restart or relocate application components after failures. In this paper, we first describe the manifold uses of HACs to protect essential layers of a critical application and present the architecture of high availability clusters. We then propose a taxonomy that covers all key aspects of HACs—deployment patterns, application areas, types of cluster, topology, cluster management, failure detection and recovery, consistency and integrity, and data synchronisation; and we use this taxonomy to provide a comprehensive survey of the end-to-end software solutions available for the HAC deployment of enterprise applications. Finally, we discuss the limitations and challenges of existing HAC solutions, and we identify opportunities for future research in the area.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.jss.2021.111208
Journal of Systems and Software
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Clustering,Dependability,Enterprise system,High availability,High availability clusters,Reliability
Journal
187
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0164-1212
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Premathas Somasekaram100.34
Radu Calinescu290563.01
Rajkumar Buyya3232081340.23