A Tailorable Environment for Assessing the Quality of Deployment Architectures in Highly Distributed Settings

TitleA Tailorable Environment for Assessing the Quality of Deployment Architectures in Highly Distributed Settings
Publication TypeConference Proceedings
Year of Publication2004
AuthorsMikic-Rakic, M., S. Malek, N. Beckman, and N. Medvidović
EditorEmmerich, W., and A. L. Wolf
Conference NameSecond International Working Conference on Component Deployment (CD 2004)
Pagination1-17
Date PublishedMay 20-21
Conference LocationEdinburgh, Scotland, UK
ISBN Number3 540 22059 3
Accession Number8134079
Keywordsdeployment architectures, distributed object management, distributed software, distributed systems, Distributed systems software [C6150N], Formal methods [C6110F], formal specification, middleware, network bandwidth, Object-oriented programming [C6110J], programming environments, software architecture, software components, Software engineering techniques [C6110B], systems deployment architecture, tailorable environment, tailorable specification
Abstract

A distributed software systems deployment architecture can have a significant impact on the systems properties. These properties will depend on various system parameters, such as network bandwidth, frequencies of software component interactions, and so on. Existing tools for representing system deployment lack support for specifying, visualizing, and analyzing different factors that influence the quality of a deployment, e.g., the deployments impact on the systems availability. In this paper, we present an environment that supports flexible and tailorable specification, manipulation, visualization, and (re)estimation of deployment architectures for large-scale, highly distributed systems. The environment has been successfully used to explore large numbers of postulated deployment architectures. It has also been integrated with a middleware platform to support the exploration of deployment architectures of actual distributed systems (17 References).