Using persistent objects for configuration management in distributed systems

Abstract

The configuration management service is responsible for providing description for managed entities in the system. It is also responsible for change management. This service, along with monitoring management, can be considered as the most basic management service that all other services need. It becomes particularly important with modern distributed systems where we have a large number of heterogeneous components with complex relationships between them and with the need to meet the requirements of a continuously changing working environment. The management kernel of our system is an extended configuration management service which provides also monitoring functions. This paper focuses on the configuration management tasks, it represents the specification. Language used to describe managed entities, along with an algorithm which realizes a difficult compromise between consistency, performance, change transparency and support for a wide class of applications.