An Autonomic Application Development & Management Environment

The proliferations of Internet technologies, services and devices have made the current network system designs and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. The complexity of current systems had led researchers to consider alternative designs and management techniques that are based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with complexity, heterogeneity and uncertainty. The approach is referred to as autonomic computing. An autonomic computing system is the system that has the capabilities of being self-defining, self-healing, self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-m protecting, etc. In this paper, we present our approach to implement an autonomic application development and management infrastructure based on XML. We refer to this environment as Autonomia [1]. It provides dynamically programmable control and management services to support autonomic configuration and deployment in network centric systems. The Autonomia environment provides application developers with all the tools required to specify the appropriate control and management schemes in order to maintain any quality of service requirement or application attribute/functionality (e.g., performance, fault, and security). The Autonomia architecture consists of three main modules: Application Management Editor (AME), Application Delegated Manager (ADM), and Autonomic Middleware Services (AMS). The AME provides users with XML software tools to describe strategies that can be used to achieve the required autonomic properties. The ADM is a software agent responsible to configure, deploy, run and maintain the autonomic properties of the application at runtime. The AMS provides a common set of autonomic services (e.g. self-configuring, self-healing, selfprotecting, self-defining, etc.). We have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept prototype system that can support the self-configuring and self-deployment function of any network application. We show through an example how we can use XML to specify the Control and management of an application and we can automatically interpret their requirements and execute them at runtime.