Scalable Evolution of Highly Available Systems

Jason Hallstrom, William Leal and Anish Arora
Journal of Object Technology

The demand for highly available software systems has increased dramatically over the past several years. Such systems must be developed using a discipline that supports unanticipated runtime evolution. We characterize the desiderata of a programming model that provides such support, and describe the design and implementation of an architecture satisfying these criteria. The Dynamic Reconfiguration Subsystem (DRSS) is an interceptor-based open container architecture that supports the development of highly available systems by enabling the scalable, dynamic deployment of cross-cutting software modifications. We have implemented a prototype of DRSS using Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

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