Transparent Dynamic Reconfiguration for CORBA

Distributed systems with high availability requirements have to support some form of dynamic reconfiguration. This means that they must provide the ability to be maintained or upgraded without being taken off-line. Building a distributed system that allows dynamic reconfiguration is very intrusive to the overall design of the system, and generally requires special skills from both the client and server side application developers. There is an opportunity to provide support for dynamic reconfiguration at the object middleware level of distributed systems, and create a dynamic reconfiguration transparency to application developers. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Reconfiguration Service for CORBA that allows the reconfiguration of a running system with maximum transparency for both client and server side developers. We describe the architecture, a prototype implementation, and some preliminary test results.