Patent ID: 8793344

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving, at a computing device, a request for a policy outcome from a user, wherein the request indicates a hypothetical event within a computer cluster; determining a cluster state, which includes state information from a plurality of server nodes in the cluster; generating a response plan for the hypothetical event based on the cluster state, without executing the response plan in the cluster, which involves: generating a hypothetical state by modifying the cluster state to account for the hypothetical event; determining an initial cluster configuration that results from the hypothetical event, indicates a plurality of resources deployed in server nodes of the cluster, and includes a plurality of resource dependencies among the resources; determining, based on the hypothetical state and the initial cluster configuration, a target cluster configuration that satisfies application policies for one or more applications deployed in the cluster; and determining an ordered sequence of actions performed by the server nodes in the cluster to realize the policies in response to the hypothetical event, wherein the sequence of actions map the cluster's initial configuration at the hypothetical state to the target configuration that satisfies the application policies; and providing the response plan to the user.