A new domain specific language for generating and validating middleware configurations for highly available applications

Nowadays, highly available services are becoming a part of our everyday life and the demand for them tends to always increase as we saw in the recent years. However, building highly available systems remains a challenging task for most system integrators who are expected to build reliable systems from none-reliable components. They have to deal with the constant pressure of the money lost in case of unplanned outages and in other cases; the consequences of such outages can threaten the life of humans. Highly available is a characteristic given to a system/service that is available 99.999% of the time. The standard in the industry for achieving such availability with a system is to build it on a specialized middleware. Such middleware will manage the redundancy of the components and will ensure their availability. On the other hand, the majority of those systems are platform-dependent and mostly proprietary. The service availability forum (SAForum) defines open standards for building and maintaining HA systems using the SAForum middleware. Nevertheless, this task remains tedious and error prone due to the complexity of this middleware configuration. In this thesis, we present a solution to automate the generation of description files for HA systems, which enables the automated generation of the middleware configuration of the previous approach. In order to achieve this objective, we propose an approach based on a new domain specific language extending the UML component diagrams, along with a corresponding set of model transformations. We also present our prototype implementation and a case study as a proof of concept verifying the approach