Publish/Subscribe systems provide a useful platform for delivering data (events) from publishers to subscribers in an anonymous fashion in distributed networks. In this paper, we promote a novel design principle for self-. dynamic and reliable content-based publish/subscribe systems and perform a comparative analysis of its probabilistic and deterministic implementations. More specifically, we present a generic content-based publish/subscribe system, called DPS (Dynamic Publish/Subscribe). DPS combines classical content-based filtering with self-. (self-organizing, selfconfiguring, and self-healing) subscription-driven clustering of subscribers. DPS gracefully adapts to failures and changes in the system while achieving scalable events delivery. DPS includes a variety of fault-tolerant deterministic and probabilistic content-based publication/subscription schemes. These schemes are targeted toward scalability, and aim at reducing and distributing the number of messages exchanged. Reliability and scalability of our system are shown through analytical and experimental evaluation.