Configuration management for highly-customizable services

The recent surge of configurable operating systems, database systems, and communication subsystems has demonstrated the importance of customization. Customization has a number of advantages, most notably performance improvements, code reuse, and meeting the quality of service requirements of the system users. One typical approach for constructing such services is to implement the service functionality as separate modules that can be configured in different combinations. Typically, ad hoc methods are used to determine which modules may be combined. Such methods require a system configurer to have intimate knowledge about the modules and their interactions or the configuration will not behave as expected. In this paper, we present a methodology for configuring custom variants of configurable services. The methodology is based on identifying the relations between software modules that dictate which combinations are correct and providing configuration support tools that allow only correct configurations to be created.