AMF configurations: Checking for service protection using heuristics

AMF (Availability Management Framework) is a middleware service that manages the availability of applications. AMF has been defined by the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum). An AMF configuration for an application running on top of AMF is a logical organization of hardware and software resources to provide and protect services. Resources, namely components, are grouped into logical entities such as service units and service groups and are set together at configuration time to provide and protect services represented as component service instances and service instances. The assignment of component service instances and service instances to components and service units, respectively, is performed at runtime by the AMF middleware. However, the configuration is valid if and only if it satisfies all AMF constraints, including the provisioning and protection of the services. Therefore, the problem is how to ensure at configuration time that the services will be protected at runtime. In a previous work, we tackled this problem and proved it to be NP-hard in general for most redundancy models. Here, we tackle the problem of AMF configuration validation further with heuristics using extended versions of heuristics developed for the bin-packing problem. We consider all the redundancy models for which the problem is NP-hard. In addition, we propose an approach which incrementally adds resources to a “likely” invalid configuration and transforms it into a valid one.