A model-driven approach for the generation of configurations for highly available software systems

High availability of services is an important requirement for mission-critical systems. The Service Availability Forum has defined standards to support the realization of high available systems. Among these standards, the Availability Management Framework (AMF) is perhaps the most important one. AMF is a middleware service that coordinates redundant application components to ensure the high availability of the services. AMF requires a configuration that describes the provided services, their types, and the deployment infrastructure. The process of generating an AMF configuration takes as input the description of the software characteristics as well as the Configuration Requirements that specify the services to be provided. Due to the large number of parameters to be taken into account, the generation of an AMF configuration can be a difficult and error-prone task. This paper proposes a new approach for the automatic generation of AMF configurations. The proposed solution is model-driven and is based on UML profiles which capture the concepts related to Configuration Requirements, software description, and AMF configurations. AMF configurations are generated using ATL-based transformations defined between these different profiles.