Automating Service Availability Analysis: An Application to a Highly Available Media-Streaming Service

Abstract

Service availability is an important aspect of service provisioning. To ensure end-to-end quality, system integrators need to build systems that satisfy quality of service requirements including high-availability. By using specialized middleware, system integrators can incorporate high availability features into their applications, thus rendering the service provisioning fault tolerant. Quantifying service availability at the system design/integration time is a challenging task considering the complexity of the availability management. In this paper we discuss a method that automates the availability analysis of middleware managed services based on the standard behavior of the middleware, while taking into consideration the various system dependencies. We illustrate our approach on a media streaming application.