Failure detection is a fundamental building block for ensuring fault
tolerance in large scale distributed systems. There are lots of approaches and
implementations in failure detectors. Providing flexible failure detection in
off-the-shelf distributed systems is difficult. In this paper we present an
innovative solution to this problem. Our approach is based on adaptive,
decentralized failure detectors, capable of working asynchronous and
independent on the application flow. The proposed solution considers an
architecture for the failure detectors, based on clustering, the use of a
gossip-based algorithm for detection at local level and the use of a
hierarchical structure among clusters of detectors along which traffic is
channeled. The solution can scale to a large number of nodes, considers the QoS
requirements of both applications and resources, and includes fault tolerance
and system orchestration mechanisms, added in order to asses the reliability
and availability of distributed systems.