Automatic Wide-Area Deployment and Caching of Component-Based Services.
Peter Backx, Bart Dhoedt, Filip De Turck, Piet M. A. Demeester · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2004
Component based frameworks, such as ME and Net, reduce complex software systems into manageable components. Whereas this simplifies the development process, the deployment phase is still a challenge. Currently the only manageable way of deploying an application is to a single server or a local area cluster. This approach forces companies to own and manage their individual server farm and thus introduces a lot of overhead. Furthermore servers are usually at the edge of the network far away from customers, which possibly leads to several problems, amongst others uncontrollable delays in the delivery of the service, because of network congestions, router outages or processing bottlenecks on the server side. This paper goes into the possibility of automatically deploying components on a wide area network. Several issues are addressed: A framework is presented to identify suitable components for this automatic deployment. Next, a heuristic is discussed to find strategic locations for component placement. While it is possible to simply deploy every component at every server, a finer level of control leads to improved results and better usage of both the networks and the servers' resources.