Description
TitleGovernance-based management of open distributed
systems
Date Created2011
Other Date2011-10 (degree)
Extentxi, 126 p. : ill.
DescriptionSoftware technology is undergoing transition from monolithic systems constructed according to a single overall design, into open systems, i.e., loosely coupled distributed and heterogeneous systems, whose component parts may be written in different languages, run on different platforms, and be designed, constructed, or even maintained under different administrative domains. For an open system to be dependable it must be managed dynamically. The common approaches of managing open systems are based on industrial standards like WSDM (Web Services DistributedManagement), and they rely on the components of the managed system to cooperate in the management process, by providing the managers with the means to monitor their state and activities, and to control their behavior. We argue these standard-based approaches have some serious deficiencies, when applied to open systems, and it largely fails to meet some critical needs of good management. In particular, we believe (1) it is unreliable and inflexible; and (2) it does not have enough ability to handle what we call reflexive management, i.e., the ability to control and coordination of the managers, and prescriptive management, i.e., the ability to let managers structure the managed system by making rules on their behaviours. Based on observation that much of the information that dynamic system management relies on involves the exchange of messages between the distributed components of the system, we propose to implement management capabilities via an appropriate regulation on the flow of messages in the system, where the regulation is conducted by governing the system components with an appropriate governance mechanism. We call this management approach as governance-basedmanagement (GBM), and we show the limitations of current management approaches can be avoided, to a large extent, by the GBM approach. The implementation of GBM employs a governance mechanism called Law-Governed Interaction (LGI). This mechanism features some of the characteristics required as the basis of GBM, among which are its high expressive power, reliable instrumentation, decentralized enforcement of policies, and the ability of organizing policies into policy hierarchies. We conducted a case study, in the context of enterprise systems, to illustrate the GBM mechanism as well as its implementation by LGI. Based on the case study, we did a series of experiments, to evaluate the performance of GBM. We show the overhead introduced by the mechanism is relatively small, especially in the context of geographically distributed systems based on Wide Area Network (WAN), and the mechanism scales well when the size of the managed system increases. Finally, we present some of our recent advances on LGI, the basis of GBM.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Wenxuan Zhang
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.