This paper describes a communication substrate, called Consul, that facilitates the development of such systems by providing a collection of fundamental abstractions for constructing fault-tolerant programs based on replicated processing. These abstractions include a multicast service, a membership service, and a recovery service.
Consul is unique in two respects.
Many projects have addressed the issues of groups, group communications and faulttolerance. 4 Protocol Description 4. S. Mishra, L. L. Peterson, and R. D. Schlichting. A communication substrate for fault-tolerant distributed programs. Technical Report TR 91-32, University of Arizona, 1991.