Automatic configuration generation for service high availability with load balancing

The need for highly available services is ever increasing in various domains ranging from mission critical systems to transaction based ones such as banking. The Service Availability Forum (SAForum) has defined a set of services and related API specifications to address the growing need of commercial-off-the-shelf high availability solutions. Among these services, the Availability Management Framework (AMF) is the service responsible for managing the high availability of the application services by coordinating redundant application components deployed on the AMF cluster. To achieve this task, an AMF implementation requires a specific logical view of the organization of the application’s services and components, known as an AMF configuration. Any AMF configuration must be compliant to the concepts and constraints defined in the AMF specifications. Developing manually such a configuration is a complex error prone task that requires extensive domain knowledge. In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic generation of AMF compliant configurations from a set of requirements given by the configuration designer and the description of the software as provided by the vendor. The objective is to alleviate the need of configuration designers to acquire profound domain knowledge and deal with the complexity of handling large number of AMF entities and their relations. One important aspect of the AMF configuration is ranking the service units, when it is required by the redundancy model, for the assignment of the workload by AMF at runtime. Our approach includes a technique for generating these rankings in such a way that guarantees load balancing even after the occurrence of a failure.