Continuous availability of services and low degree
of disruption are two inherent necessities for mission-critical
software systems. These systems could not be stopped to
perform updates because disruption in their services
consequent irretrievable losses. Additionally, compared to
offline update, the changes should preserve the correct
completion of ongoing activities. In order to place the affected
elements in a safe state before dynamic changes take place, the
notion of tranquility has been proposed to make quiescence
criterion less disruptive and easier to obtain. Additionally,
some other approaches have been proposed in order to tackle
the shortcomings of these seminal proposals. However, these
approaches impose some challenges to the safe dynamic
reconfiguration of component-based systems. In this paper,
existing challenges to preserve global consistency during
runtime software reconfiguration in distributed contexts are
described. The contribution of this paper is to propose a
number of guidelines which can be served as agenda for future
direction of research to enable a dependable safe stopping of
running component-based systems.
History
Publication
Adaptive and Reconfigurable Service-oriented and Component-based Applications and Architectures;pp. 66-71