Towards automatic and independent internet services configuration

Contemporary network management frameworks have limited high-level functionalities. This makes administrator´s manual intervention a common necessity, which is a highly complex activity for heterogeneous networks. State of the art research projects deal with methodologies to create high-level intelligent management systems that attenuates administrator´s dependence. But making real implementations is a difficult task. It lack´s middle-level abstractions, that facilitates the access to the network services and devices low-level management interfaces. Here we propose an Automated and Distributed Network Service Configuration subsystem that using mid-level independent representations, abstracts the Internet services (and devices) implementation details and promotes the development of real independent high-level representations that can be applied to any management context. To prove such configuration management independence an automated and independent Domain Name Service configuration replication prototype tool was built. Experiments showed that aside the implementation independent configuration management it increases significantly the network resilience to service failures or performance degradation by providing real operational gains when compared against current, manual-based, configuration management tools.