Part II. Architecture
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# Part II. Architecture

As the demand and availability for distributed systems increase, the infrastructure technology required to support them has become more complex. As complexity increases, the amount of human intervention required to maintain systems force additional errors, resulting in escalating costs and potential (inevitable) downtime. As distributed systems fail, costs go up. Essentially, we see that distributed systems fail largely because mechanisms needed to dynamically provision, scale, react to failure and meet service level objectives are not designed into the fabric upon which distributed systems are built.

At the core of these issues is the fundamental tenet that systems must be crafted with the reality that changes occur. Compute resources fail, are introduced into the network, have assets diminished. Applications executing on compute resources may fail, or suffer performance degradation based on diminishing compute resource capabilities and/or assets. Technology used must provide distributed, self-organizing, network-centric capabilities. These building blocks enable a dynamic, distributed architecture capable of adapting to unforeseen changes on the network. Benefits of this approach are clear:

• Become more network centric, harnessing the capabilities of compute resource assets dynamically • Being able to scale to orders of magnitude • Dynamically adapt to the addition and removal of compute resources • Ensure Quality of Service through declarative specifications of software components

Rio provides a dynamic architecture for developing; deploying and managing distributed applications composed of services. Key to the architecture is a set of dynamic capabilities and reliance on policy-based and Quality of Service mechanisms. Rio reduces the complexity surrounding the development of dynamic services by introducing dynamic Jini technology remoting for POJOs, as well as providing a simple component model.

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Building and running tasks on your grid | Home | Chapter 4. Architecture Fundamentals