Autonomous Reconfiguration Procedures for EJB-based Enterprise Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, extensible approach for seamless, component-oriented reconfiguration of EJB-based enterprise applications during runtime, ensuring high availability and minimal disruption.

Contribution

It introduces a set of generic, autonomous reconfiguration procedures for EJB-based enterprise applications using the mKernel infrastructure, enabling flexible and fine-grained updates.

Findings

Provides a complete set of reconfiguration steps

Supports multiple reconfiguration strategies

Enables autonomous, runtime application updates

Abstract

Enterprise Applications (EA) are complex software systems for supporting the business of companies. Evolution of an EA should not affect its availability, e.g., because of a temporal shutdown, business operations may be affected. One possibility to address this problem is the seamless reconfiguration of the affected EA, i.e., applying the relevant changes while the system is running. Our approach to seamless reconfiguration focuses on component-oriented EAs. It is based on the Autonomic Computing infrastructure mKernel that enables the management of EAs that are realized using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 technology. In contrast to other approaches that provide no or only limited reconfiguration facilities, our approach consists of a comprehensive set of steps, that perform fine-grained reconfiguration tasks. These steps can be combined into generic and autonomous reconfiguration procedures for EJB-based EAs. The procedures are not limited to a certain reconfiguration strategy. Instead, our approach provides several reusable strategies and is extensible w.r.t. the opportunity to integrate new ones.