Discrete control for safe execution of IT automation workflows

Yin Wang, Terence Kelly, Stéphane Lafortune
2007 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2007 - EuroSys '07  
As information technology (IT) administration becomes increasingly complex, workflow technologies are gaining popularity for IT automation. Writing correct workflow programs is notoriously difficult. Although static analysis tools are available, fixing defects remains manual and error-prone. This paper applies discrete control theory to IT automation workflows. Discrete control detects flaws in workflows just as static analysis does, and more importantly it also allows safe execution of flawed
more » ... orkflows by dynamically avoiding run-time failures. Our approach can guarantee compliance with certain requirements and can partially decouple requirements from software, reducing the need to modify the latter if the former change. We have implemented a discrete control module for a real IT automation system. Experiments with workflows from a real production system and with randomly generated workflows show that our approach scales to workflows of practical size.
doi:10.1145/1272996.1273028 dblp:conf/eurosys/WangKL07 fatcat:2dk57vfdjbhdfhhr4uat7f3l4q