Abstract
In an environment where hardware and software errors may take an application down, high levels of service availability can be obtained by combining redundant hardware infrastructure with powerful application management frameworks which are able to detect these errors and recover from them. The Service Availability Forum (SAF) Application Interface Specification (AIS) defines interfaces used by the application management framework (AMF) to control applications placed under their supervision. The main goal of the AMF is to guarantee that for a given service there is always at least one instance of an application providing the service. In most cases the application implementing a service also encapsulates some data which is critical for the availability of the service. This data (called the application state) has to be preserved in a way that if the application providing the service fails, the replacing application can restore the application state and continue providing the service with minimal service disruption. The SAF AIS defines interfaces (named checkpoint interfaces) by which the application can save and restore its state. This paper describes the use of SAF AMF and checkpoint services in implementing applications providing highly-available services. The use of AMF and checkpoint services for implementing applications with the 2N or N-way active redundancy models is presented in the paper. It briefly discusses the interactions between the application, and AMF/checkpoint services during both (i) fault-free operations, as well as (ii) the error recovery procedures. The paper also suggests the most suitable checkpoint options for both of these redundancy models, depending on the tradeoff between protecting the integrity of the application state and the overhead of state saving/restoration by the application.
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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Brossier, S., Herrmann, F., Shokri, E. (2005). On the Use of the SA Forum Checkpoint and AMF Services. In: Malek, M., Reitenspieß, M., Kaiser, J. (eds) Service Availability. ISAS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3335. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30225-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30225-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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