Deploying Loosely Coupled, Component-based Applications into Distributed Environments

With significant advances in software development technologies in recent years, 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 some requirements and constraints are met. This process is called software deployment. For large, distributed, component-based applications with many constraints and requirements, it is difficult to do the deployment process manually, and some automated tools and techniques are required. This paper presents a graph-based approach for this purpose that is not dependent on any specific component technology and does the deployment planning 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.