Supporting distributed application management in Sampa

Abstract

The paper presents the architecture and base services of Sampa, a System for Availability Management of Process-based Applications. The system has been designed to support the management of fault-tolerant DCE-based distributed programs according to user provided and application-specific availability specifications. Sampa is supposed to detect and automatically react to faults such as node crashes, network partitions, process crashes and hang-ups. We focus on the design of its base services-the monitoring, reliable group communication and checkpointing facilities and show how they can be used for managing a generic replicated service.