The proposed standard for Fault-Tolerant CORBA envisions the management of replicated data within a group communication framework. We propose an alternative majority consensus approach that does not require any knowledge of the network topology and guarantees the consistency of the replicated data in the presence of any non-Byzantine failure. Our protocol relies on dynamic voting and volatile witnesses to reduce its storage and message overhead. Each witness only contains a bitmap describing which entities belong to the current majority block. The protocol is proposed as a suitable solution to fulfill the strong fault-tolerant requirements of critical applications. We found that three replicas and two witnesses managed by our protocol had similar availability and average response time as the best group communication protocols. Our protocol clearly outperforms object group communication for update requests with the same number of replica entities.; We also introduce an architecture pattern for the deployment of any fault-tolerant strategy as well as the containerization of the framework for open, web-enabled, enterprise applications.
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