The Inherent Difficulty of Timely Primary-Backup Replication

The advent of cloud computing with remote compute and data centers is changing the way in which computing services are offered. We are interested in the question of whether telecommunications services can be offered in a cloud environment. These services differ from those hosted currently on cloud platforms in that they have rather strict requirements on delay and jitter, which may be regulatory, or imposed by human perception. For instance, large values of delay, jitter, or packet loss can make it impossible to have a conversation. Services are expected to be highly reliable.