Replication (computing)

Replication in computing involves sharing information so as to ensure consistency between redundant resources, such as software or hardware components, to improve reliability, fault-tolerance, or accessibility.

One speaks of:

A computational task is typically replicated in space, i.e. executed on separate devices, or it could be replicated in time, if it is executed repeatedly on a single device. Replication in space or in time is often linked to scheduling algorithms

The access to a replicated entity is typically uniform with access to a single, non-replicated entity. The replication itself should be transparent to an external user. Also, in a failure scenario, a failover of replicas is hidden as much as possible. The latter refers to data replication with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) aspects.

Computer scientists talk about active and passive replication in systems that replicate data or services:

If at any time one master replica is designated to process all the requests, then we are talking about the primary-backup scheme (master-slave scheme) predominant in high-availability clusters. On the other side, if any replica processes a request and then distributes a new state, then this is a multi-primary scheme (called multi-master in the database field). In the multi-primary scheme, some form of distributed concurrency control must be used, such as distributed lock manager.

Load balancing differs from task replication, since it distributes a load of different (not the same) computations across machines, and allows a single computation to be dropped in case of failure. Load balancing, however, sometimes uses data replication (especially multi-master replication) internally, to distribute its data among machines.

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