Service Availability: Principles and Practice

Our society increasingly depends on computer-based systems; the number of applications deployed has increased dramatically in recent years and this trend is accelerating. Many of these applications are expected to provide their services continuously. The Service Availability Forum has recognized this need and developed a set of specifications to help software designers and developers to focus on the value added function of applications, leaving the availability management functions for the middleware.

A practical and informative reference for the Service Availability Forum specifications, this book gives a cohesive explanation of the founding principles, motivation behind the design of the specifications, and the solutions, usage scenarios and limitations that a final system may have. Avoiding complex mathematical explanations, the book takes a pragmatic approach by discussing issues that are as close as possible to the daily software design/development by practitioners, and yet at a level that still takes in the overall picture. As a result, practitioners will be able to use the specifications as intended.

• Takes a practical approach, giving guidance on the use of the specifications to explain the architecture, redundancy models and dependencies of the Service Availability (SA) Forum services
• Explains how service availability provides fault tolerance at the service level
• Clarifies how the SA Forum solution is supported by open source implementations of the middleware
• Includes fragments of code, simple example and use cases to give readers a practical understanding of the topic
• Provides a stepping stone for applications and system designers, developers and advanced students to help them understand and use the specifications

Maria Toeroe, Ericsson, Canada
Maria Toeroe has been in the telecommunications industry for over 10 years conducting research and standardisation in the area of dependable software, service availability and fault tolerance utilizing the expertise she gained in her prior work in the academia related to formal description techniques and their use in protocol engineering. Having represented Ericsson in the Service Availability Forum since 2005, Maria has led several standardization efforts in different chair positions of the SA Forum Technical Work Group.? Within Ericsson she is also responsible for university collaborations related to her fields. She has been an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Concordia University since 2007. Maria holds a Diploma degree from the Institute of Engineering Economics Kharkov, a University Doctorate and a PhD from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

Francis Tam, Nokia, Finland
Francis Tam has conducted research, development and standardisation in the dependable software area of service availability and fault tolerance in the telecommunications industry for more than 16 years. He has served as industrial adviser to three European Commission funded projects on dependable computer systems and frequently gives lectures on highly available systems to the Master of Engineering students at INSA Lyon in France. Francis holds a BSc in Computer Science from Queen Mary College (University of London), an MSc in Computing Science from North Staffordshire Polytechnic and a Doctor of Science (Technology) in Software Systems from Tampere University of Technology in Finland.