Automated system design for availability

Large-scale systems experience frequent failures which can result in unacceptably high service downtime or application execution time. To meet performance and availability requirements, the user must perform a complex design task including the selection and configuration of hardware and software components and mechanisms for handling failures. We believe users should be relieved of this burden by automating the design process in order to generate cost-effective solutions from high-level application requirements. In this paper, we present Aved, a proof of concept design automation engine which is a first step toward this goal. We describe how infrastructure choices, application models, and user requirements are represented with Aved to automate design space search and reason about design alternatives. We additionally present examples to illustrate how Aved can generate a complete picture of the cost-availability and cost-performance tradeoffs for the infrastructure design.