Serpentine: adaptive middleware for complex heterogeneous distributed systems

Abstract

Adaptation of system parameters is acknowledged as a requirement to scalable and dependable distributed systems. Unfortunately, adaptation cannot be effective when provided solely by individual system components as the correct decision is often tied to the composition itself and the system as a whole. In fact, proper adaption is a cross-cutting issue: Diagnostic and feedback operations must target multiple components and do it at different abstraction levels. We address this problem with the Serpentine middleware platform. By relying on the industry standard JMX as a service interface, it can monitor and operate on a wide range of distributed middleware and application components. By building on a JMX-enabled OSGi runtime, Serpentine is able to control the life-cycle of components themselves. The scriptable stateless server and cascading architecture allow for increased dependability and flexibility.