Distributed applications are often built from sets of distributed
components that must be co-ordinated in order to
achieve some global behaviour. The common approach is to
use a centralised controller for co-ordination, or occasionally
a set of distributed entities. Centralised co-ordination
is simpler but introduces a single point of failure and poses
problems of scalability. Distributed co-ordination offers
greater scalability, reliability and applicability but is harder
to reason about and requires more complex algorithms for
synchronisation and consensus among components.
In this paper we present a system called GOANNA that
from a state machine specification (FSM) of the global behaviour
of interacting components can automatically generate
a correct, scalable and fault tolerant distributed implementation.
GOANNA can be used as a backend for different
tools as well as an implementation platform in its own right.