Exploiting Gossip for Self-Management in Scalable Event Notification Systems

Challenges of scale have limited the development of event notification systems with strong properties, despite the urgent demand for consistency, reliability, security, and other guarantees in applications developed for sensitive tasks in large enterprises. These issues are the focus of Quicksilver, a new multicast platform targeted to large- scale deployments. An initial version of the system can support large numbers of overlapping multicast groups, high data rates and groups with large numbers of members. However, Quicksilver still requires manual help when discovering the system configuration and can't easily enforce certain types of application monitoring and integrity constraints. In this paper, we propose to extend Quicksilver by introducing gossip mechanisms, yielding a self-managed event notification platform. The two technologies are presented through a single interface and appear to end users as live distributed objects, side-by- side with other kinds of typed components.