Recommendation and Application of Fault Tolerance Patterns to Services

Abstract

Service technology such as Web services has been one of the mainstream technologies in today’s software development. Distributed services may suffer from communication problems or contain faults themselves, and hence service consumers may experience service interruption. A solution is to create services which can tolerate faults so that failures can be made transparent to the consumers. Since there are many patterns of software fault tolerance available, we end up with a question of which pattern should be applied to a particular service. This paper attempts to recommend to service developers the patterns for fault tolerant services. A recommendation model is proposed based on characteristics of the service itself and of the service provision environment. Once a fault tolerance pattern is chosen, a fault tolerant version of the service can be created as a WS-BPEL service. A software tool is developed to assist in pattern recommendation and generation of the fault tolerant service version.