Availability management of distributed programs and services

Modern distributed applications pose increasing demands for high availability, automatic management , and dynamic connguration of their software systems. This paper presents the architecture of Sampa, a System for Availability Management of Process-based Applications, which aims at fullll-ing these requirements. The system has been designed to support the management of fault-tolerant DCE-based distributed programs according to user-provided and application-speciic availability speciications. 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, check-pointing, and connguration management facilities { and show how they can be used for managing a generic fault-tolerant service.