Availability management of distributed programs and services

ABSTRACT

Modern distributed applications pose increasing demands for high availability, automatic management, and dynamic configuration of their software systems. This paper presents the architecture of Sampa, a System for Availability Management of Process-based Applications, which aims at fulfilling these requirements. The system has been designed to support the management of fault-tolerant DCE-based distributed programs according to user-provided and application-specific availability specifications. It is supposed to detect and automatically react to faults such as node crashes, network partitions, process crashes, and hang-ups. In this paper, we focus on the design of some of its services - the monitoring, checkpointing, and configuration management facilities - and show how they can be used for managing a generic fault-tolerant service.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.5 Reliability
          Subjects: Checkpoint/restart; Fault-tolerance

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Management, Measurement, Performance, Reliability, Theory