Molecular Approach Paves the Way towards High Resilience for Large Mission-Critical Information Systems

The molecular approach was introduced in the DESEREC project to describe large information systems in a manageable way. This level of abstraction bring to each person running a business service the capability to optimize the cost of the level of dependability committed while supporting the security and infrastructure administrators duties. The coordination of those management roles under the priority given to the business-level agreements achieves a maximum of resilience for a minimum of redundant resources.This molecular approach is presently used by the modelling and simulation tools and is being implemented in the three tiers of the management infrastructure: local reaction (self-healing), global reaction (reconfiguration), and learning loop.This level of abstraction allows near real-time decisions on reaction and reconfiguration even on large information systems and eases the human understanding of the reasoning used by the decision engines. It also brings the information needed for the evolution of the rule sets governing the self-healing and the reconfiguration.