2013 International Conference on Mechatronic Sciences, Electric Engineering and Computer (MEC)

Dec 20-22, 2013, Shenyang, China

A Unified API Gateway

for High Availability Clusters
Qian Zhang#*, Hanyue Chu* Mingyu Li*, Xiaohui Hu*
# *
Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences Sci. and Tech. on Integrated Info. System Laboratory
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China Beijing, China
{zhangqian11, hanyue}@iscas.ac.cn {mingyu, hxh}@iscas.ac.cn

Abstract—High-availability (HA) clusters are widely used to occurs when a company intends to integrate legacy
provide high availability services. Recently, many HA cluster applications.
solutions and products have been proposed or developed by
different organizations. However, each HA cluster system has its
own administrative tool and application programming interface
(API). Besides, vendor lock-in makes customers dependent on the
specific vendors’ own high availability clusters. Therefore, it is
very complicated to simultaneously manage various HA clusters.
To solve this problem, a novel SOA-based Unified API Gateway
for high-availability Clusters (UAGC) is proposed in this paper.
Under UAGC, cluster services are conveniently managed in a
unified way, which is independent of platforms or programming
languages. Six web service interfaces are implemented in UAGC
to cover most cluster functions. A UAGC-based web service
(UAGCService) is implemented with WCF. The experimental
results show that UAGCService has good performances.

Keywords—SOA-based; API gateway; administrative tool;

Cluster Consolidation
I. INTRODUCTION
With the growing use of services in cloud computing, the
high availability of services becomes increasingly important
[1]. Any little downtime of services will cause great economic
losses. High-availability (HA) cluster minimize the downtime
of critical services or applications when there comes system or
server failure. Today, many cluster service providers developed
their own high-availability cluster software and management
tools, such as RoseHA, NEC HA, Microsoft Cluster Service
(MSCS) [2] and Linux-HA [3]. Each cluster service solution
defines its own particular APIs, and makes it not easy to
consolidate different cluster services.
Without a unified management tool, services running on
different HA clusters are maintained separately with private
APIs or tools provided by different vendors. Configuration is
complicated because the operations and interactive methods
vary among solutions and products. There is a scenario. As
shown in Figure 1, a company has multiple applications
running on Windows, Linux and other platforms. Different HA
cluster solutions must be studied in order to construct HA
clusters on different platforms to guarantee the high availability
of critical services. It is necessary to integrate user interfaces of
different cluster solutions. Meanwhile, vendor lock-in is
created by commercial solution providers for business or sale
considerations. The above-mentioned problem frequently
This work was supported by the National High Technology Research
and Development Program of China (863 Program) No.2012AA011206
and Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation No.4133092.
Fig. 1. Unified Management of HA Clusters
In order to solve the practical and emerging problem, a
unified API gateway for HA clusters is proposed in this paper.
With the Unified API Gateway for Clusters (UAGC), the
public interfaces and operations are provided to manage
different cluster services, and therefore to enhance convenience
and efficiency.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
gives a brief overview of related works; Section III and Section
IV presents the design and implementation of UAGC; Section
V states the results of experiments; The paper is concluded in
Section VI.
II. RELATED WORK
A. High-Availability Cluster
High-availability clusters [4], namely failover clusters or
HA clusters are a set of computers that guarantee availability
goals with minimum downtime for services and applications.
HA clusters utilize redundant computers in groups that
maintain services when system fails. The configurations of
high-availability clusters are categorized into three models:
active/active, active/passive, and multi active/passive. Cluster
administrative tools are usually backend GUI or command-line
components. Cluster administrative tools run on each cluster
node to manage and configure the complete cluster server or
manage and configure a set of services. Nowadays, there are
many HA cluster management products and solutions from

978-1-4799-2565-0/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 2321

kinds of vendors. Some components of those solutions are
regarded as cluster administrative tools [5].
RedHat Cluster Suite (RHCS) [6] and Linux-HA [3] are
two typical HA cluster solutions on Linux. Pacemaker, also
known as a cluster administrative tool, is a high-availability
resource manager and Linux-HA is configured with
pacemaker. Conga is also a cluster administrative tool and
RHCS is configured with Conga. Meanwhile, there are some
commercial products and solutions on other OSs, such as
Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS). Cluster.exe is a command-
line interface for managing MSCS.
Some solutions also have high-availability feature. For
instance, the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) [7] is used to build
highly available and highly scalable services. The Linux
Virtual Server built with a load balancer is a well-known Load-
Balance Cluster. High-availability features in the LVS are not
considered in this paper.
B. Consolidated Cluster systems
With the growing of the large-scale infrastructures,
traditional clusters cannot address new challenges in the cloud
age [8]. Consolidated cluster systems can be used to solve the
problems. Nevertheless, there are only a few studies on
heterogeneous consolidated cluster issues.
There are two typical consolidation modes: unified and
extensional. The original clusters consolidated in the unified
mode are interfered by consolidated cluster system. Mesos [9]
is a typical unified consolidated cluster system. Mesos is a
resource scheduler and distributor across different original
clusters such as Hadoop, MPI, and Spark, with modifications
of original implementation of the clusters. Yarn [10] is also a
unified consolidated cluster system. The extensional
consolidated mode is without interference from the original
clusters. Original clusters are directly integrated by the
consolidated cluster system via existent interfaces in this mode,
such as HTCondor [11]. However, all the original clusters in
the consolidated cluster systems are high performance
computing (HPC) clusters. Those systems are not designed for
consolidating heterogeneous HA cluster.
III. ARCHITECTURE OF THE PROPOSED UAGC
In the cloud age, the large-scale infrastructures on the
clusters bring about big challenges on the management of data
centers. In order to minimize the total cost of business,
traditional clusters are inevitable to be consolidated. Some
Most legacy applications in different HA clusters are integrated
to the consolidated clusters in data centers. However, these
applications cannot be modified. This problem can be
addressed by unified these applications in the unified mode.
For this reason, a SOA-based uniform API gateway is proposed
for HA clusters in this paper.
The rest of this section is organized as follows. First, SOA-
based architecture of UAGC is presented. Second, web-service
interfaces of UAGC are introduced. Finally, service invocation
mode mechanism of the UAGC is stated.
A. SOA-based Architecture
Fig. 2. Legacy Encapsulation Patterns
Fig. 2 shows a legacy encapsulation pattern of SOA
[12][13]. Service consumers directly invoke the legacy APIs
with the traditional implement. However, with the legacy
encapsulation pattern, service consumers invoke the custom
legacy wrapped service by evolving or replacing the legacy
implementation to minimize the impact on existing service.
Original high-availability cluster systems need to evolve the
legacy wrapped services, and high-availability clusters
consolidation are achieved. With the legacy encapsulation
pattern, the architecture of UAGC is extracted.

Fig. 3. Architecture of UAGC
As shown in Fig. 3, the proposed UAGC mainly consists of
three parts: Clusters, Cluster Service API Gateway, and Web
Service Client.
Clusters, which are shown in the right part of Fig.3,
indicate cluster service products. The part is legacy implement
shown in Fig.2. MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Service), Linux-HA
and other related cluster service solutions are supported.
Cluster Service API Gateway and Clusters are custom
legacy wrapped service. Cluster Service API Gateway, which is
shown in the middle part of Fig.3, contains a cluster service
abstract API for Clusters and various clusters drivers. The API
Gateway works as a wrapper around different cluster services,
abstracts their differences, and then produces unified interfaces.
For each cluster service product or solution, Cluster Service
API Gateway offers unified interfaces of cluster service
provider’s native API. Thus, Cluster Service API Gateway
frees users from dealing with the differences of each cluster’s
unique API. The various kinds of drivers can deal with the
differences among the clusters. Therefore, Cluster Service API
Gateway is the most critical component in the UAGC. It as an
adapter plays a major role in different HA cluster service
solutions.

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 Web Service Client, which is shown in the left part of Fig.
3, namely service consumers, can use any language or platform
to invoke the Cluster Service API Gateway. The languages
supported include C++, C#, Java, et al. Web Service Client can
start or stop an instance of the cluster service by using the same
method, no matter which OSs such as Windows or Linux are
running. Therefore, the operations provided in Web Service
Client are simple. Original clients can manage cluster service
from multi-platforms with a unified method.
In summary, UAGC provides a method to maintain cluster
services in a more familiar and convenient way. Meanwhile,
UAGC preserves the compatibility amongst diverse cluster
services. Besides, UAGC supports almost all major HA cluster
services. Thus, consumers can build and manage the HA
clusters more easily with the proposed UAGC.
 detected based on heartbeats. In fact, the cluster network is a
Fig. 4. Interfaces of Cluster Service API Gateway
B. Web-service Interfaces
Cluster Service API Gateway has six types of interfaces,
including Cluster and Cluster Node, Cluster Group, Cluster
Resources, Cluster ResourceType, Cluster Network, and
Cluster Network Interface, as shown in Fig. 4.
1) Cluster and Cluster Node
All the operations of cluster and cluster nodes are included
in the interface of the cluster/cluster Node. The status
information of monitored clusters and cluster nodes can be
obtained. And clusters and cluster nodes can also be created,
removed, stopped, started, suspended, and resumed. The
properties of clusters and cluster nodes can be got or set
through the interface of the Cluster/Cluster Node.
2) Cluster Group
Cluster Group represents resource group. Interdependent
resources are grouped into many cluster groups. For instance, a
MySQL resource group meanwhile includes database resource
required to the services, associated network resources including
network name and IP address, and the used physical disk
resource. All the operations of resource groups are included in
the interface of the Cluster Group. Users can get the vital
information about management of resource groups, including
the status (online, offline, partially online). Users also can
create, delete, remove, start, stop, online, offline, rename the
cluster group. The properties of clusters and cluster nodes can
be obtained and set through the interface of the cluster group,
including the information (failover period, failover threshold,
auto failback type, failback window start and end) about
failover and failback.
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3) Cluster Resources
Each application is regarded as a kind of resources.
Resource management and scheduler is the key part in the
management of the cluster. All the operations and information
monitoring functions of critical resources are covered by
resource interfaces. For example, view resources’ availability
status; create, delete, rename, move, online, or offline the
resources in specified group; add, view, and remove the
dependency between resources in a group and the owner node
of the specified resource. The properties of clusters and cluster
nodes can also be obtained and set by using the interface of the
Cluster Resources.
4) Cluster ResourceType
A type is one of the properties of resources. A new resource
type is created when new application frameworks are
consolidating. The type of resource can be deleted, got or set
information (the owner list and properties). Generally, these
properties include name, interval setting to judge whether the
resources is running or not , and some related files of the
resource type such as dynamic-link library in Windows,
configuration files in Linux.
5) Cluster Network
Cluster network provides a uniform interface for
communicating with the other nodes. Through the cluster
network and cluster network interface, node failures can be
supporting component in Cluster Service API Gateway. The
operations about cluster network are very simple. The main
function of cluster network is to display the basic information
and status of the cluster network. Through the cluster network,
the cluster network status (connected or disconnected) can be
gained. Cluster network’s properties such as network name,
network address, network address mask, network description,
and network communication role can be viewed or set by using
Cluster Service API Gateway.
6) Cluster Network Interface
Cluster network interface is also a supporting component in
Cluster Service API Gateway. Cluster network interface’s
status (connected or disconnected) can be obtained to
determine the situation of the node network. Properties of the
cluster network interface, including cluster network interface
name, cluster network name, cluster node name, cluster
network adapter and adapter ID, cluster network interface
address, can also be viewed through cluster network interface.
Note that the interface address is different from the network
address. The interface address means a machine address, for
example 192.168.0.123, but the network address means a
network address, for example 192.168.0.0. Through the status
and information of cluster network and cluster network
interface, cluster service can control the resource failover and
failback between nodes.
C. Service Invocation Mode
At the web service client, making synchronous calls to
some cluster services can lead to failure occasionally because
of time delay, because synchronous calls are blocking and
some cluster services can lead to considerable delay
sometimes, for example, service failover. Asynchronous
calling pattern of cluster services is devised to avoid this • Binding. It specifies the communication pattern,
problem. For an asynchronous call, other processes are including transport protocols , message encoding, etc.
permitted to continue before the transmission has finished. The WCF defines eleven types of bindings. Five of them are
asynchronous calls of cluster services comprise of the commonly used, namely: Basic binding, TCP binding,
following operations as shown in Table 1. IPC binding, Web Service (WS) binding, and MSMQ
binding. WS binding is used in UAGCService to ensure
TABLE I. ASYNCHRONOUS FUNCTIONS
reliability and security.
Cluster and Cluster Node Cluster Resources • Address. Each service is associated with a unique
CreateNewCluster CreateNewClusterResource address in WCF. An address in WCF consists of
CreateNewNode DeleteClusterResource transport protocols, the location of the server, the port
SetClusterProperty OnlineClusterResource and the name of the service. For instance,
StopNodeClusterService OfflineClusterResource http://uagc.ha.local:9001/UAGCService.
StartNodeClusterService SetResourceProperty
SetNodeProperty ResourceRestartAction UAGCService is configured specially in terms of security,
Cluster Group ResourceThreshold service connection, and WCF service proxy initialization.
CreateNewClusterGroup ResourceRestartPeriod
DeleteClusterGroup ResourcePendingTimeout
OnlineClusterGroup ResourceRetryPeriodonFailure
OfflineClusterGroup MoveResourceToOtherGroup
SetGroupProperty RenameResource
GroupFailoverThreshold AddResourceOwner
GroupFailoverPeriod RemoveResourceOwner
GroupAutoFailbackType SetResourceFail
GroupFailbackWindow AddResourceDependency
SetGroupOwners RemoveResourceDependencies
MoveGroupToOtherNode SetClusterQuorum
RenameGroup Cluster ResourcesType
SetClusterGroupNode CreateClusterResourceType
Cluster Network DeleteClusterResourceType
SetNetworkProperties SetResourceTypeProperties
RenameClusterNetwork Cluster Network Interface
SetNetworkInterfaceProperties
There are several kinds of results returned from the
interfaces. If parameters are entered correctly and operations
are executed successfully, then the information of the correct Fig. 5. An Implementaiton of the UAGC based on WCF
results will be returned. On the contrary, if the parameter
inputted is incorrect, the tips for input errors will be offered by Security. The endpoints of different services are invoked by
the cluster services API gateway. And if parameters are entered a client. In UAGCService, the security of communication with
correctly and the operations failed, the information of system two parties is guaranteed with the Kerberos protocol. The user
errors will be returned to remind the users. rights authentication is based on username and password. A
client cannot call the services until it passes the authentication,
IV. IMPLEMENTATION OF UAGC as shown in the right part of Figure 5.
A UAGC-based web service (UAGCService) is In this paper, six interfaces and over sixty HA cluster
implemented with Windows Communication Foundation functions are implemented in UAGCService.
(WCF).
WCF [14] is a set of tools based on .NET Framework for V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
implementing Web Service applications. It is designed with The performance of UAGCService is tested for a MSCS
SOA principles for distributed and interactive applications. (Microsoft Cluster Server) Cluster running on Windows 2003
WCF-based applications commonly run on Windows, but they Servers. Three experiments are conducted: 1) the time
can also run on Linux with Mono [15]. So the Linux-HA driver consumed in connecting to UAGCService for the first time; 2)
of UAGCService is also implemented with WCF. In WCF, the time of executing some operations of MSCS with server; 3)
services are identified by endpoints which are described by the time of executing some operations of MSCS with client.
contracts, bindings and addresses, as shown in Figure 5.
Without UAGC, remote administrations of MSCS Clusters
• Contract. In WCF, contracts describe what services are usually performed with Windows Powershell and Telnet.
exposes in a platform-neutral and standard way. WCF And the operations are ultimately carried out by cluster.exe on
defines four types of contracts: service contract, data the servers. Windows Powershell is a task automation
contract, operation contract, and message contract. The framework built on .Net. Powershell controls administrative
former three types are used to outline the tasks with command-line and scripting language. Telnet
UAGCService. However, message contracts are suitable provides a command-line interface to access to a remote host.
in interoperability cases so they are not used in The result of Experiment 1 is shown in Table II. WFC service
UAGCService.

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proxy is slower than PowerShell, but faster than Telnet. The SOA-based APIs that can be used to manage services on
reason is that when UAGCService is invoked for the first time, different HA clusters. Furthermore, it can be used to avoid
it needs to be initialized, which leads to time consuming. vendor lock-in and integrate heterogeneous platforms.
An implementation of UAGC, called UAGCService is
TABLE II. INITIAL CONNECTION SERVICES WITH CLIENT(TIME:S) described in this paper. The results show that UAGCService
Telnet PowerShell The Proposed Method has good performances.
10.600 0.491 0.979 In the future, the improvement of UAGC will support more
HA cluster service providers and provide the API gateway of
the load-balanced cluster management. The implementation
will be further studied to optimize cluster service management
and simplify the operations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The first author would like to thank Xiaowei Yi from the
Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences for his
meticulous help on language editing.

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In this paper, a Unified API Gateway for high-availability
Clusters (UAGC) is proposed. UAGC provides a set of unified

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