Anderson, Paul

Rovatsos, Michael

Wickler, Gerhard

Herry

other

2022-09-15T16:13:45Z

2022-09-15T16:13:45Z

2015-06-29

The declarative approach has been widely accepted as an appropriate way to manage configurations of large scale systems – the administrators describe the specification of the “desired” configuration state of the system, and the tool computes and executes the necessary actions to bring the system from its current state into this desired state. However, none of state-of-the-art declarative configuration tools make any guarantees about the order of the changes across the system involved in implementing configuration changes. This thesis presents a technique that addresses this issue – it uses the SFP language to allow administrators to specify the desired configuration state and the global constraints of the system, compiles the specified reconfiguration task into a classical planning problem, and then uses an automated planning technique to automatically generate the workflow. The execution of the workflow can bring the system into the desired state, while preserving the global constraints during configuration changes. This thesis also presents an alternative approach to deploy the configurations – the workflow is used to automatically choreograph a set of reactive agents which are capable to autonomously reconfigure a computing system into a specified desired state. The agent interactions are guaranteed to be deadlock/livelock free, can preserve pre-specified global constraints during their execution, and automatically maintain the desired state once it has been achieved (self-healing). We present the formal semantics of SFP language, the technique that compiles SFP reconfiguration tasks to classical planning problems, and the algorithms for automatic generation and execution of the reactive agent models. In addition, we also present the formal semantics of core subset of SmartFrog language which is the foundation of SFP. Moreover, we present a domain-independent technique to compile a planning problem with extended goals into a classical planning problem. As a proof of concept, the techniques have been implemented in a prototype configuration tool called Nuri, which has been used to configure typical use-cases in cloud environment. The experiment results demonstrate that the Nuri is capable of planning and deploying the configurations in a reasonable time, with guaranteed constraints on the system throughout reconfiguration process.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/39364

http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/2614

en

The University of Edinburgh

H. Herry and P. Anderson, Planning Configuration Relocation on the BonFIRE Infrastructure, In Proceedings of CloudCom 2013 Workshop on Using and Building Cloud Testbeds (UNICO’13), 2013.

H. Herry, P. Anderson, and M. Rovatsos, Choreographing Configuration Changes, In Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM’13), 2013.

P. Anderson, S. Bijani, and H. Herry, Multi-agent Virtual Machine Management Using the Lightweight Coordination Calculus, In Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XII, pages 123-142, 2013.

H. Herry and P. Anderson, Planning with Global Constraints for Computing Infrastructure Reconfiguration, In Proceedings of the AAAI-12 Workshop on Problem Solving using Classical Planners (CP4PS’12), 2012.

H. Herry, P. Anderson, and G. Wickler, Automated Planning for Configuration Changes, In Proceedings of 25th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA’11), 2011

cloud computing

automated planning

system configuration

Automated planning for cloud service configurations

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy