Architecting Fault Tolerant Systems, July 2012.

摘要

Building trustworthy (dependable) systems is a major challenge faced by software developers. To this end, various fault tolerance mechanisms have been developed by researchers and used in industry. Unfortunately, more often than not these solutions ignore earlier development phases - most importantly, the architecture design to exclusively focus on the implementation instead. This creates a dangerous gap between the requirement to build dependable (and fault tolerant) systems and the failure to address these issues at any stage preceding the implementation step. Software Architecture has been widely accepted as a way to achieve a better software quality while reducing the time and cost of production. While typical architectural specifications model only the normal behaviour of the system, ignoring the abnormal ones, several approaches have recently been developed which break the wrong pattern. The aim of this paper is to survey the existing approaches to architecting fault tolerant systems, offering its readers a clear picture of the state of the art research in this emerging area.