Explains fault tolerance in clear terms, with concrete examples drawn from real-world settings Highly practical focus aimed at building "mission-critical" networked applications that remain secure

Reliable Distributed Systems reviews and describes the key concepts, principles and applications of modern distributed computing systems and architectures. This self-contained book consists of five parts. The first covers introductory material, including the basic architecture of the Internet, simple protocols such as RPC and TCP, object oriented architectures, operating systems enhancements for high performance, and reliability issues. The second covers the Web, with a focus on Web Services technologies, Microsoft's .NET and the Java Enterprise Edition. The remaining three parts look at a number of reliability and fault-tolerance issues and techniques, with an emphasis on replication applied in Web Services settings. Anyone seeking to develop a solid grounding in distributed computing and Web Services architectures will find the book an essential and practical learning tool.

Basic Distributed Computing Technologies.- Fundamentals.- Basic Communication Services.- High Assurance Communication.- Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Model.- Styles of Client/Server Computing.- CORBA: The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.- System Support for Fast Client/Server Communication.- Web Technologies.- The World Wide Web.- Major Web Technologies.- Web Services.- Related Internet Technologies.- Platform Technologies.- Reliable Distributed Computing.- How and Why Computer Systems Fail.- Overcoming Failures in a Distributed System.- Dynamic Membership.- Group Communication Systems.- Point to Point and Multi-group Considerations.- The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model.- Consistency in Distributed Systems.- Applications of Reliability Techniques.- Retrofitting Reliability into Complex Systems.- Software Architectures for Group Communication.- Related Technologies.- Security Options for Distributed Settings.- Clock Synchronization and Synchronous Systems.- Transactional Systems.- Peer-to-Peer Systems and Probabilistic Protocols.- Prospects for Building Highly Assured Web Services.- Other Distributed and Transactional Systems.