An Architecture for Versatile Dependability

Versatile dependability is a software architecture that aims to quantify the trade-offs among a system’s fault-tolerance, performance and resource requirements, and that provides system-level “knobs” for tuning these trade-offs. We propose a visual representation of the trade-off space of dependable systems, and discuss design principles that allow the tuning of such trade-offs along multiple dimensions. Through a case study on tuning system scalability under latency, bandwidth and fault-tolerance constraints, we demonstrate how our approach covers an extended region of the dependability design space.