Interactive configuration management for distributed systems

This paper describes an environment for interactive configuration management. Configurations specify the composition and interconnecting bindings of components that make up distributed systems. Our environment is integrated with the Darwin configuration language and represents a running configuration in an interactive management environment. Once a configuration has been created, it can be monitored and modified by the interactive manager without reference to the original specification. Our graphical management environment can display composition hierarchy and different forms of inter-component binding. Interactive binding and safe rebinding is fully supported and visualised by the interactive configuration manager. Our model furthermore encompasses a facility for maintaining and evolving persistent representations of running configurations. The configuration management environment can detect and display failed configurations and the persistent configurations can be used to recreate failed composite components.The integration of our model for interactive configuration management into an overall domain-oriented management platform is described. We give examples of use with the management user interface, and outline our implementation architecture based on a CORBA platform.