Towards a Cloud Service for State-Machine Replication

Alexander Heß (Ulm University),
Franz J. Hauck (Ulm University)

State-machine replication (SMR) is a well-known technique to achieve fault
tolerance for services that require high availability and fast recovery times.
While the concept of SMR has been extensively investigated, there are still
missing building blocks to provide a generic offer, which automatically serves
applications with SMR technology in the cloud. In this work, we introduce a
cloud service architecture that enables automatic deployment of service
applications based on customer-friendly service parameters, which are mapped
onto an internal configuration that comprises the number of replicas, tolerable
failures, and the consensus algorithm, amongst other aspects, The deployed
service configuration is masked to large extent with the use of threshold
signatures. As a consequence, a reconfiguration in the cloud deployment does
not affect the client-side code. We conclude the paper by discussing open
engineering questions that need to be addressed in order to provide a
productive cloud offer.