An Architecture for Reliable Encapsulation Endpoints Using Commodity Hardware

Abstract

Custom hardware is expensive and making software reliable is difficult to achieve as complexity increases. Recent trends towards cloud computing highlight the importance of operating continuously using both unreliable commodity hardware and, as services grow in complexity, failure-vulnerable software. We have developed an approach for building dependable networking software that exposes a reliable encapsulation service to clients although it executes on commodity hardware, we do so without substantially increasing the implementation complexity of the encapsulation software. Our approach demonstrates the viability of building reliable systems using unreliable components, including unreliable server software.