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Navigating in the Storm: Using Astrolabe to Adaptively Configure Web Services and Their Clients

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Abstract

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 low loads 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 allow Web Services client systems to autonomically adapt when a data center becomes slow or unreachable.

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Correspondence to Kenneth P. Birman.

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The authors were supported by Intel Corporation, DARPA/AFRL grant RADC F30602-99-1-0532, by AFOSR/MURI grant F49620-02-1-0233, Microsoft Research BARC and the Cornell/AFRL Information Assurance Institute.

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Birman, K.P., Renesse, R.v. & Vogels, W. Navigating in the Storm: Using Astrolabe to Adaptively Configure Web Services and Their Clients. Cluster Comput 9, 127–139 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-7559-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-7559-z

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