Aziz B

Foley S

Herbert J

Swart G

English

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Automatic Configuration of Services for Security, Bandwidth, Throughput, and AvailabilityGarret Swart* University College Cork Cork, Ireland g.swart@cs.ucc.ie Benjamin Aziz University College Cork Cork, Ireland b.aziz@cs.ucc.ieSimon Foley University College Cork Cork, Ireland s.foley@cs.ucc.ie John Herbert University College Cork Cork, Ireland j.herbert@cs.ucc.ie ABSTRACTThe process of efficiently deploying a complex system of services on a complex network of servers is tedious and error prone, with many properties to check and many possibilities to examine. Automated tools are needed to turn this into a humanly tractable problem. We present a precise model of a service-oriented computing system that allows many important configuration properties to be defined and optimized for, including throughput, network bandwidth, security and availability. We transform this model into a system of constraints that can then be solved using mathematical and constraint programming yielding an optimal system configuration that meets all the stated requirements. We have implemented this in OPL and have used it to generate optimal configurations for realistic systems with tens of services running on hundreds of servers communicating on multiple subnets.Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.0 [Computer Communication Networks]: General – Security and protection. C.2.3: Network Operations – Network management, C.4.0: [Performance of Systems] Modeling techniques, Performance attributes K.6.4: [Management of Computing and Information Systems] System Management – Quality assurance General Terms Management, Performance, Security. KeywordsAutomated Server Provisioning, Service-oriented Computation, Automated Network Management, Autonomous Computing, Quality of Service (QoS) 1. INTRODUCTION The process of deploying complex systems of services on a complex network of servers is fraught with peril for the systems administrator. No one wants to be on the front page of the New York Times when a multi-million dollar system becomes inaccessible due to an unforeseen problem with an obscure configuration setting. No one wants to be asked by the boss why the network has to be upgraded when a simple reconfiguration might be adequate.  No one wants to spend days looking at ways of making do with the current hardware because the budget is used up but new applications are coming online. Good systems configuration needs precise checking and exhaustive optimization, not just rules of thumb and heartfelt prayer.  We suggest solving this problem by the use of mathematical modeling.  Methods rooted in mathematics can result in configurations that are provably optimal and correct.  Methods rooted in mathematics can be amenable to machine reasoning rather than the more onerous and error prone human variety. Using formal techniques we can translate engineering intuition into mathematical constraints. In this paper we define a precise model of a service-oriented computing system.  We argue that this model is close enough to reality to be interesting. We then define various properties of the model that correspond to important properties in real systems. The properties that we define and optimize for are network security, server throughput, service availability and network bandwidth.  All of these terms have been bandied about enough that they need careful definitions, and we define them using our mathematical model.We then encode this model and properties into an Optimization Programming Language (OPL) application so that a combination of mathematical and constraint programming techniques that are part of the OPL implementation can be brought to bear on this problem to produce a set of optimal assignments of logical components to physical resources. Using the facilities of OPL, we write a system model that defines the data to be presented and its constraints.  This model can be instantiated to represent any computing system that falls within the model.  Once instantiated, the model can be solved by OPL to find the optimal configuration of resources that meets the requirements.  This separation of the model, its instantiation and solution technique allow such systems to be used by systems administrators without a degree in operations research. Finally we show the results of this model when applied to a realistic system containing 26 services and 240 servers on 5 subnets.Novel aspects of this work include:  – The application of configuration modeling and optimization to general service oriented computation. The service model that we introduce and the complex relations that services can have with each other allows us to model service-oriented systems “from the phosphor to the oxide.” – The simultaneous modeling of many configuration properties so that the values of these properties can be played off against each other, and a framework that allows even more properties to be defined and modeled. This work in Copyright © 2004 by the authors. It may be reproduced for personal and scholarly use only. *This author’s current address is: IBM Almaden Research Center; 650 Harry Road;  San Jose, California 95120 gswart@almaden.ibm.org. 

Automatic configuration of services for security, bandwidth, throughput, and availability

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