A Roadmap towards Autonomic Service-Oriented Architectures

The advent and proliferation of Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) drives computing infrastructures into a highly interconnected, heterogeneous, and dynamic world. Conventional management tools fail in the attempt to deal with the heterogeneity and the dynamics associated with this type of information infrastructures. More and more researchers try to cope with the complexity, heterogeneity, and uncertainty by using technologies inspired by biological systems. A promising approach for managing such largescale IT infrastructure is to provide capabilities for selforganization, which – to some extent – is analogous to the human autonomic system (as postulated in IBM’s Autonomic Computing Initiative and as extended in the German Organic Computing Initiative). This paper outlines a common view on Autonomic Service-oriented Architectures and proposes a way to get such an autonomic infrastructure. An outline of the differences between autonomic service-oriented architectures and other systems with autonomic properties is followed by a discussion of the existing enabling technologies and of missing pieces on the roadmap to a selforganizing infrastructure.