Globule: A platform for self-replicating web documents

Replicating Web documents at a worldwide scale can help reducing user-perceived
latency and wide-area network traffic. This paper presents the preliminary design
of Globule, a platform which automates all aspects of such replication: serverto-
server peering negotiation, creation and destruction of replicas, selection of
the most appropriate replication strategies on a per-document basis, consistency
management and transparent redirection of clients to replicas. To facilitate the
transition from a non-replicated server to a replicated one, we designed Globule as
a module for the Apache Web server. Therefore, converting normal Web documents
should require no more than compiling a new module into Apache and editing a
configuration file.