Navigating in the storm: Using Astrolabe to adaptively configure web services and their clients

摘要

The dramatic growth of distributed computing applications is creating both an opportunity and a daunting challenge for users seeking to build applications that will play critical roles in their organization. Here, we discuss the use of a new system, Astrolabe, to automate self-configuration,monitoring, and to control adaptation. Astrolabe operates by creating a virtual system-wide hierarchical database, which evolves as the underlying information changes. Astrolabe is secure, robust under a wide range of failure and attack scenarios,and imposes lowloads even under stress.To focus the discussion,we structure it around a hypothetical Web Services scenario. One of the major opportunities created by Astrolabe is to allowWeb Services client systems to autonomically adapt when a data center becomes slow or unreachable.