Building dependable distributed applications using AQUA

Abstract

Building dependable distributed systems using ad hoc methods is a challenging task. Without proper support, an application programmer must face the daunting requirement of having to provide fault tolerance at the application level, in addition to dealing with the complexities of the distributed application itself. This approach requires a deep knowledge of fault tolerance on the part of the application designer, and has a high implementation cost. What is needed is a systematic approach to providing dependability to distributed applications. Proteus, part of the AQuA architecture, fills this need and provides facilities to make a standard distributed CORBA application dependable, with minimal changes to an application. Furthermore, it permits applications to specify, either directly or via the Quality Objects (QuO) infrastructure, the level of dependability they expect of a remote object, and will attempt to configure the system to achieve the requested dependability level. Our previous papers have focused on the architecture and implementation of Proteus. This paper describes how to construct dependable applications using the AQuA architecture, by describing the interface that a programmer is presented with and the graphical monitoring facilities that it provides.