The characteristics of distributed applications that desire fault-tolerance is changing. In the past, fault-tolerance was an important requirement of mission-critical applications with the primary concerns being continous availability as well as the ability to tolerate arbitrary failures; the associated costs and the overhead imposed by fault-tolerance techniques were secondary concerns. In contrast, most of the emerging distributed applications are not necessarily mission-critical and desire fault-tolerance techniques that

1. impose minimal overhead on failure-free execution,
2. provide fast crash recovery from common-case failure scenarios,
3. use few dedicated resources, and
4. can be transparently integrated with applications.

The goal of the Egida project is to meet these requirements by developing a new framework using rollback-based recovery protocols (such as message-logging and checkpointing) for applications in which processes communicate by messages, files, or a combination of the two.