Model-Based Dependency Management for Migrating Service Hosting Environment

The proper operation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) strongly depends on the correct configuration of the service hosting environment that is essentially being shaped on a distributed system. Effective migration management of the distributed system is an absolute requirement to cope with intrinsic-changed nature of SOA. However, due to the large amount of configurations existing in the distributed system services and the complex dependencies among them, to migrate into a distributed system satisfying the operation requirement of SOA becomes an error-prone and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a model-based dependency management approach to migrate the distributed system services of the service hosting environment. Our approach has three contributions. Firstly, a model, called system service configuration model is defined for describing configuration parameters and the dependencies of different distributed system services. Secondly, based on the model, dependency management mechanisms are provided for validating the integrity of the configuration discovery process, checking the potentially cyclic dependencies and forming the correct setting sequence. Thirdly, a supporting tool, called system configuration migration (SCM), is implemented to demonstrate our approach, which has been deployed and used in the real migration cases.