Automated support for recovery

Abstract

Transactions have traditionally been applied to database systems in order to guarantee data consistency in the face of failures. We propose to expand the role of transactions into a general model for application recovery. To achieve this goal, we use dynamic metaprogramming in order to inject the transactional recovery code at runtime, thus ensuring the system's portability through the use of a standard execution environment. Since this recovery method does not require programmer intervention, but, rather, transforms the code automatically, we believe it can potentially simplify the design and implementation of self-healing autonomic systems and reduce the potential for failure in large-scale distributed applications, thus realizing a central tenet of autonomic computing.