A Model Based Framework for Service Availability Management by Pejman Salehi A Thesis in The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 2012 © Pejman Salehi, 2012 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Pejman Salehi Entitled: A Model Based Framework for Service Availability Management and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Electrical & Computer Engineering) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final examining committee: Chair Dr. P. Grogono Dr. D. Amyot External Examiner Dr. J. Rilling External to Program Dr. S. Abdi Examiner Dr. R. Dssouli Examiner Dr. A. Hamou-Lhadj Thesis Co-Supervisor Dr. F. Khendek Thesis Co-Supervisor Approved by Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director April 11, 2012 Dean of Faculty ABSTRACT A Model Based Framework for Service Availability Management Pejman Salehi, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2012 High availability of services is an important requirement in several domains, including mission critical systems. The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) is a consortium of telecommunications and computing companies that defines standard middleware solutions for high availability. Availability Management Framework (AMF) manages the high availability of services by coordinating their application components according to redundancy models. To protect these services, AMF requires a configuration, i.e. a representation of the organization of the logical entities composing an application under its control. AMF configuration design is error-prone and tedious if done manually, due to the complexity of the AMF domain. This PhD thesis explores the effective design and analysis of AMF configurations, proposing a model-based management framework that facilitates this process. We propose a domain-specific modeling language that captures AMF domain concepts, relationships, and constraints, facilitating the management of AMF configurations. We define this language by extending UML through its profiling mechanism, capturing the concepts of AMF configurations and the description of the software for which the configuration will be generated. We introduce a new approach for the automatic generation of AMF configurations based on our UML profile using model transformation techniques. This approach consists of a set of transformations from the software description entities into AMF configurations iii while satisfying the requirements of the services to be provided as well as the constraints of the deployment infrastructure. We also propose a third-party AMF configuration validation approach consisting of syntactical and semantic validations. Syntactical validation checks the well-formedness of third-party configurations by validating them against AMF standard specification requirements captured in our UML profile. Semantic validation focuses on ensuring the runtime protection of services at configuration time (the SI-Protection problem). SI- Protection has combinatorial aspects and results in an NP-hard problem for most redundancy models, which we have tackled by devising a heuristic-based method, overcoming its complexity. We present proofs of concepts by using different available technologies: IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA) for implementing our UML profiles, Eclipse environment for developing a prototype tool for validating third-party configurations, and Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) for developing a prototype implementation of our model-based configuration generation approach. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank the many people who have made this thesis possible through their wisdom and mentorship: First, my supervisors Dr. Ferhat Khendek and Dr. Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj who have guided me through this venture with their insightful advice; and secondly, to Dr. Maria Toeroe for her tireless dedication and meticulousness. I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues and friends from the MAGIC Project, Dr. Pietro Colombo, Ali Kanso, and Dr. Abdelouahed Gherbi, for their friendship and support. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial support received through the organizations contributing to the MAGIC Project: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Ericsson Software Research and Concordia University. I would also like to express my appreciation for the research facilities provided by Concordia University. I would like to extend my thanks to the examining committee for their support during the various stages of my PhD and for their effort in the final evaluative process. I express my profound appreciation to my girlfriend, Katherine, for her for her love, encouragement, support and her tireless proofreading. I would like to show my gratitude to my little sister Mahsa for always supporting me during the various stages of my life. I would also like to thank my uncles for always believing in me and encouraging me during my studies. v I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents, Mahnaz and Hossein, to whom this thesis is dedicated, for their endless love and support throughout my life. I would like them to know that I am eternally indebted to them. vi Table of Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Thesis Motivation ................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Contributions ........................................................................................................ 4 1.3 Thesis Organization.............................................................................................. 6 2 Background and Literature Review ............................................................................. 8 2.1 High Availability and SA Forum ......................................................................... 8 2.1.1 Service Availability ...................................................................................... 8 2.1.2 The Service Availability Forum.................................................................... 9 2.1.3 The Availability Management Framework ................................................. 10 2.1.4 The Entity Types File.................................................................................. 17 2.2 Modeling and UML Profiles .............................................................................. 18 2.2.1 The UML Profiling Mechanism.................................................................. 19 2.2.2 Related UML Profiles ................................................................................. 22 3 Modeling Framework- Domain Models .................................................................... 28 3.1 Domain Modeling Process ................................................................................. 29 3.2 AMF Domain Model .......................................................................................... 30 3.2.1 AMF Components and Component Types ................................................. 31 3.2.2 SU, SG, SI, CSI and their Types ................................................................. 33 3.2.3 Deployment Entities.................................................................................... 34 3.2.4 Well-formedness Rules ............................................................................... 35 3.2.5 Challenges ................................................................................................... 40 3.3 ETF Domain Model ........................................................................................... 41 vii 3.3.1 Basic Service Provider and Service Elements ............................................ 42 3.3.2 Compound Elements ................................................................................... 44 3.3.3 Software Dependency ................................................................................. 46 3.3.4 Domain Constraints .................................................................................... 47 3.3.5 Challenges ................................................................................................... 48 3.4 CR Domain Model ............................................................................................. 49 3.5 Summary ............................................................................................................ 51 4 Modeling Framework- Mapping to UML Metamodel .............................................. 52 4.1 Mapping Domain Model Concepts to UML Metaclasses .................................. 54 4.1.1 AMF Component ........................................................................................ 55 4.1.2 AMF Service Unit (SU) .............................................................................. 55 4.1.3 AMF Service Group (SG) ........................................................................... 55 4.1.4 AMF Application ........................................................................................ 56 4.1.5 AMF Component Service Instance (CSI) ................................................... 56 4.1.6 AMF Service Instance (SI) ........................................................................