1. A computer-implemented method for evaluating service availability of an Availability Management Framework (AMF) configuration, the AMF configuration describing how configuration entities of a highly available system are grouped and comprising information on service provision and service protection policies against resource failure, the AMF configuration comprising a hierarchy of the configuration entities, wherein components are at a lowest one of a plurality of levels in the hierarchy and nodes provide an execution environment for the components, the method comprising the steps of: receiving the AMF configuration as input, the AMF configuration defining a set of failure types for each of the components and each of the nodes, and specifying a failure rate and a recommended recovery for each of the failure types; analyzing the AMF configuration, based on the recommended recovery for a given one of the components and a set of recovery altering attribute values defined in the AMF configuration, to obtain an actual recovery that the highly available system is to perform when the given component fails, wherein the recovery altering attribute values are defined for the configuration entities at the plurality of levels of the hierarchy; mapping the AMF configuration to a stochastic model that captures dependencies among the components and among the configuration entities at the plurality of levels of the hierarchy; and utilizing the model to calculate the service availability of the AMF configuration based on the failure rate, the actual recovery and the dependencies to thereby estimate availability of services to be provided by the highly available system.