A reliability-aware framework for service-based software development

Abstract

It is becoming more common to see software applications taking advantage of the many RESTful web services available publicly to meet their needs rather than developing an in-house solution. This introduces the problem where failures can occur in the network or on the service provider outside the influence of a developer. This paper introduces a reliability-aware framework with a focus on availability which applies concepts from a recovery block scheme to services provided publicly by different developers. The proposed framework allows developers to specify alternative services which meet the core specifications of their desired primary service. When a failure is determined to have occurred, the request to the primary service is mapped to an alternative service to complete the operation. A prototype implementation has been developed as a proof of concept of the design which has been evaluated on metrics based on potential use cases. The experimental results show that the system is successful at providing availability when failure occurs at a cost to overall performance.