System and method for dynamic, transparent migration of services

摘要

System and method for the dynamic and transparent migration of services in a peer-to-peer networking environment. Member peers in a peer group using a peer-to-peer platform may cooperate to provide redundant instances of services to member peers. Dynamic migration of a service may be performed by unbinding one or more peer-to-peer platform pipes from a peer hosting an instance of the service and binding the pipes to another peer hosting a different instance of the service. Using pipes, services may transparently failover from one physical peer endpoint to another in order to mask a service or peer failure, or to access a newly published instance of a service. Thus, a collection of peers may provide a high level of fault tolerance, where, for example, a new peer at a different location may replace a crashed peer, with the new peer taking over the existing pipe to keep the communication going.