Dynamic Reconfiguration of Scalable Internet Systems with Mobile Agents
Fábio Kon, Roy H. Campbell, Ramesh Chandra, Arun Viswanathan · 1999
As the importance of Internet services such as electronic commerce and information and communication systems increases, it becomes necessary that these services be available continuously 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But software is always evolving and it is often necessary to reconfigure running systems to upgrade some of its components or to change its configuration parameters. In addition, Internet services must scale well to be able to serve thousands or even millions of users. This scenario raises three conflicting issues that need to be resolved: availability, flexibility, and scalability. We propose the use of mobile reconfiguration agents for efficient and scalable dynamic reconfiguration of Internet systems. In this paper, we describe a prototype implementation of a CORBA-compliant ORB that supports the reconfiguration of its middleware engine as well as the reconfiguration of applications running on top of it. A graphical front-end assists administrators to build reconfiguration agents...