A Loosely Coupled Federation of Distributed Management Services

This paper describes an architecture for management services. The architecture consists of a number of small components, each performing a highly specialized task. Together, they form a dynamic, highly automated, yet integrated management system. The components are plug-and-play services that use Jini to dynamically establish communication links among themselves and form transient management federations. Our architecture is built around a configuration service which provides for consistent configuration of managed resources. We identify a number of common management scenarios and demonstrate how they can be supported by our system. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]