Declarative Infrastructure Configuration Synthesis and Debugging

There is a large conceptual gap between end-to-end infrastructure requirements and detailed component configuration implementing those requirements. Today, this gap is manually bridged so large numbers of configuration errors are made. Their adverse effects on infrastructure security, availability, and cost of ownership are well documented. This paper presents ConfigAssure to help automatically bridge the above gap. It proposes solutions to four fundamental problems: specification, configuration synthesis, configuration error diagnosis, and configuration error repair. Central to ConfigAssure is a Requirement Solver. It takes as input a configuration database containing variables, and a requirement as a first-order logic constraint in finite domains. The Solver tries to compute as output, values for variables that make the requirement true of the database when instantiated with these values. If unable to do so, it computes a proof of unsolvability. The Requirement Solver is used in dif...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JNSM
• Authors: Sanjai Narain, Gary Levin, Sharad Malik, Vikram Kaul
• Keywords: Configuration Error, First-order Logic, JNSM 2008, Requirement Solver