Method, system and program products for defining nodes to a cluster

This invention relates, in general, to a distributed computing environment, and in particular, to managing one or more clusters of nodes of a distributed computing environment. Various components are provided to manage a clustered environment. These components include a System Registry that provides a global data storage; a Configuration manager that stores data locally on nodes of the clustered environment and globally within the System Registry; a Liveness component to provide status of communications paths of the cluster; a Group Services component that provides services to one or more other components of the clustered environment; and a Resource Management component that communicates with one or more resource controllers of the clustered environment. Each of the components of the clustered environment has one or more data and/or functional dependencies on one or more other components of the environment. However, relationships between the components are created such that the data and functional dependencies form an acyclic graph (i.e., a cycle of dependency relationships is avoided).