Self-managing federated services

TLDR

The authors aim to deploy and manage federated services across multiple organizations by introducing a peer‑to‑peer framework that automatically adjusts component numbers and placements in response to system or client load changes. Their decentralized framework employs per‑node monitoring agents and per‑service‑component management agents that gossip system state, search for better configurations against application models and performance targets, and enact changes after random delays. Experiments on a prototype UDDI service demonstrate that autonomous agents quickly converge to a stable, appropriate configuration when system dynamics change.

Abstract

We consider the problem of deploying and managing federated services that run on federated systems spanning multiple collaborative organizations. In particular, we present a peer-to-peer framework targeted to the construction of self-managing services that automatically adjust the number of service components and their placements in response to changes in the system or client loads. Our framework is completely decentralized, depending only on a modest amount of loosely synchronized global state. More specifically, our framework is comprised of a set of per-node monitoring agents and per-service-component management agents that periodically exchange information about the state of the system and of the service with each other using a gossiping protocol. Each management agent then periodically searches for configurations that are better than the current one according to an application model and explicit performance and availability targets. On finding a better configuration, an agent will enact the new configuration after a random delay to avoid possible collisions. We evaluate our framework by studying a prototype UDDI service. We show that while agents act autonomously, the service rapidly reaches a stable and appropriate configuration in response to system dynamics.