CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT OF OBJECT GROUPS

Abstract

Object groups provide a basis for replication and parallelism which increase the opportunities to improve performance, availability or fault tolerance. The improved performance is gained via parallel execution of multiple processes, possibly residing on different hosts. Improved availability and fault tolerance may be gained by replicating a program module in different locations. Conferencing is an example showing a cooperation of multiple objects. However, multiple members in the object group and coordination between them add a major degree of complexity; a large number of objects are involved and the membership continually changes. The configuration management provides automated support for the object group to selectively hide this complexity. Multiple objects are configured into an object group and behave towards other objects as if the multiple objects were collectively one object. Infrastructure and primitives to support dynamic configuration of object groups are introduced in this paper. The design and principles laid down in this paper are based on the ANSA and SE-ODP which develop open distributed processing models.