A Graph-based Approach for Deploying Component-based Applications into Channel-based Distributed Environments

With significant advances in software development technologies, it is now possible to have complex software applications, which include a large number of heterogeneous software components distributed over a large network of computers with different computational capabilities. To run such applications, their components must be instantiated on proper hardware resources in their target environments so that user requirements and constraints are also met. This process is called software deployment. However, this process is often challenging for large, distributed, component-based applications with many constraints and requirements. This article presents a graph-based deployment approach that does the deployment with respect to the communication resources required by application components and communication resources available on the hosts in the target environment. In our approach, component-based applications and distributed environments are modeled with the help of graphs. Deployment of an application is then defined as the mapping of the application graph to the target environment graph. This article further discusses how this mapping could be done to minimize the cost and to maximize the reliability of deployments.