Method and system for improving the availability of software processes utilizing configurable finite state tables

The invention provides a system and method for providing a high availability application at low cost for a wide range of solution architectures. A user runs a simplistic web-based wizard to install the high availability application. Then, a user designs the high availability application's logic for an individual process or process-group using a finite state table. Next, a standard UNIX init process spawner subsystem is extended to implement the high availability application as a property of a process. Finally, the logic from the finite state table is used to make each process or process-group highly available.