Enhanced Configuration Generation Approach for Highly Available COTS Based Systems

The design of configurations for high availability management is a complex and error prone task. Automation of the process is a first step towards improving the quality of such configurations and for exploring the different potential solutions for a given set of requirements. An automated approach for configuration generation for applications deployed on top of the Service Availability Forum (SAForum) middleware has been proposed in the literature. This approach, however, may generate several configurations among which some may not meet the required level of service availability. Therefore, these configurations need to be analyzed to select one for the deployment. This is a complex process as many configurations may be generated and considered throughout the process. In this paper, we propose to enhance this configuration generation approach with a method to eliminate early in the generation process some configurations that cannot meet the service availability requirement. The method estimates the service availability for the different possible combinations of software components, which can provide the requested services, taking into account the properties of these components and the behaviour of the SAForum middleware.