Architecting and Implementing Versatile Dependability

Distributed applications must often consider and select the appropriate trade-offs among three important aspects ? fault-tolerance, performance and resources. We introduce a novel concept, called versatile dependability, that provides a framework for analyzing and reasoning about these trade-offs in dependable software architectures. We present the architecture of a middleware framework that implements versatile dependability by providing the appropriate "knobs" to tune and re-calibrate the trade-offs. Our framework can adjust the properties and the behavior of the system at development-time, at deployment-time, and throughout the application's life-cycle. This renders the versatile dependability approach useful both to applications that require static fault-tolerance configurations supporting the loss/addition of resources and changing workloads, as well as to applications that evolve in terms of their dependability requirements. Through a couple of specific examples, o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Tudor Dumitras, Deepti Srivastava, Priya Narasimhan
• Keywords: Dependability Requirements, ICSE 2004, Software Engineering, Versatile Dependability, Versatile Dependability Approach