page_title: Application Interface Specification
section_title: Management services
hierarchical_section_title: Application Interface Specification / Management services
caption_attribution_description: English: APIs provided by the Information Model Management Service
context_page_description: The Application Interface Specification is a collection of open specifications that define the application programming interfaces for high-availability application computer software. It is developed and published by the Service Availability Forum and made freely available. Besides reducing the complexity of high-availability applications and shortening development time, the specifications intended to ease the portability of applications between different middleware implementations and to admit third party developers to a field that was highly proprietary in the past.
context_section_description: The various entities implemented by the AIS services (e.g. execution environments, checkpoints, components, etc.) are represented as managed objects in the SA Forum Information Model (IM), which can be seen as a configuration management database. The managed objects are instances of object classes defined by the relevant AIS service specification, which defines the class attributes and administrative operations. The administrative operations specified for the object classes represent operations that can be performed on the entities represented by the objects, e.g. locking a service unit or exporting the contents of the IM in XML format. The objects in the IM are stored in a tree hierarchy where an object can have, at most, one parent object and any number of child objects.
  The logical entities represented by the objects in the IM are not generally implemented by the IMM Service itself; instead, user applications and the AIS Services, such as the Checkpoint Service or the Availability Management Framework provide their implementation. Therefore, these are called object implementers (OI). For management purposes, all AIS services expose their implemented entities as managed objects through the IMM service.
  There are two categories of objects and attributes in the IM: runtime and configuration.
  Runtime objects and attributes reflect the current state of the entities they represent – they are of descriptive nature.
  In contrast, configuration objects and attributes are prescriptive as for management applications – or object managers (OM) – they are the means to provide input to the object implementers on what entities they need to implement.
  Configuration objects may include both configuration and runtime attributes while runtime objects may include only runtime attributes. Administrative operations may be defined on both object categories.
  Accordingly, the IMM Service exposes a “southbound” interface – the IMM-OI API – to object implementers and a “northbound”  interface – the IMM-OM API – to management applications (fig. 5), e.g. SNMP agents, and mediates between these two parties. It is also responsible for storing the persistent objects and attributes.
caption: APIs provided by the Information Model Management Service
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