Component-Based Autonomic Management System

Today's computing environments are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They involve numerous complex software that cooperate in potentially large scale distributed environments. These software are developed with very heterogeneous programming models and their configuration facilities are generally proprietary. Therefore, the administration of these software (installation, configuration, tuning, repair ...) is a much complex task which consumes a lot of resources: • human resources as administrators have to react to events (such as failures) and have to reconfigure (repair) complex applications, • hardware resources which are often reserved (and overbooked) to anticipate load peaks or failures. A very promising approach to the above issue is to implement administration as an autonomic software. Such a software can be used to deploy and configure applications in a distributed environment. It can also monitor the environment and react to events such as failures or overloads and reconfigure applications accordingly and autonomously. The main advantages of this approach are: • Providing a high-level support for deploying and configuring applications reduces errors and administrator's efforts. • Autonomic administration allows the required reconfigurations to be performed without human intervention, thus saving administrator's time. • Autonomic administration is a means to save hardware resources as resources can be allocated only when required (dynamically upon failure or load peak) instead of pre-allocated.