Dependable, online upgrades in enterprise systems

ABSTRACT

Software upgrades are unreliable, often causing downtime or data loss. I propose Imago, an approach for removing the leading causes of upgrade failures (broken dependencies) and of planned downtime (data migrations). While imposing a higher resource overhead than previous techniques, Imago is more dependable and easier to use correctly.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. Boyapati et al. Lazy modular upgrades in persistent object stores. In Object-Oriented Programing, Systems, Languages and Applications, pages 403--417, Anaheim, CA, Oct 2003.
• 2: O. Crameri et al. Staged deployment in Mirage, an integrated software upgrade testing and distribution system. In Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 221--236, Stevenson, WA, Oct 2007.
• 3: T. Dumitras and P. Narasimhan. Why do upgrades fail and what can we do about it? In ACM/IEEE/IFIP Middleware Conference, Urbana Champaign, IL, Nov-Dec 2009.
• 4: T. Mens et al. Challenges in software evolution. In Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution, pages 13--22, Lisbon, Portugal, Sep 2005.
• 5: L. Moser et al. Eternal: fault tolerance and live upgrades for distributed object systems. In Information Survivability Conference and Exposition, pages 184--196, Hilton Head, SC, Jan 2000.
• 6: I. Neamtiu, M. Hicks, G. Stoyle, and M. Oriol. Practical dynamic software updating for C. In ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 72--83, Ottawa, Canada, Jun 2006.
• 7: Office of Government Commerce. Service Transition. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). 2007.
• 8: Oracle Corporation. Rolling upgrades of stateful J2EE applications in Oracle Application Server. White Paper, Aug 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.3 Software Management

General Terms:
Management, Reliability

Keywords:
data migration, dependability, hidden dependencies, online upgrades, software upgrades