Replication (computing) - Terminology

Terminology

One speaks of:

• data replication if the same data is stored on multiple storage devices,
• computation replication if the same computing task is executed many times.

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.

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:

• active replication is performed by processing the same request at every replica.
• passive replication involves processing each single request on a single replica and then transferring its resultant state to the other replicas.

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.

Backup differs from replication in that it saves a copy of data unchanged for a long period of time. Replicas, on the other hand, undergo frequent updates and quickly lose any historical state.