A system is adapted to generate a configuration for a service provider system to provide a highly available (HA) service. The system first identifies type stacks that provide the HA service and one or more component types in each type stack. Each type stack is a combination of prototypes that describe features and capabilities of available software providing the HA service. The system estimates, for each component type in the type stacks, a mean-time-to-recover (MTTR) of the HA service based on time for completing an actual recovery action in response to a component failure. The system further estimates service availability provided by each type stack based on the MTTR and a mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) of each component type in the type stack. The system then eliminates one or more of the type stacks that do not satisfy a requested service availability before proceeding to subsequent steps of configuration generation.