An Autonomic Web Services Environment Using a Reflective and Database-oriented Approach

The growing complexity of Web service platforms and their dynamically varying workloads make manually managing their performance a tough and time consuming task. Autonomic computing systems that are self-configuring and self-managing have emerged as a promising approach to dealing with this increasing complexity. In this paper we propose a framework for an Autonomic Web Services Environment (AWSE) constructed using a collaborative framework of Autonomic Managers that leverage each component in the AWSE with self-managing capabilities. We present a unique approach to designing the Autonomic Managers for the AWSE framework by combining reflective programming techniques with extended database functionality. The validity of our approach is illustrated by a number of experiments performed using prototype implementations of our autonomic managers. The experimental results demonstrate self-tuning capabilities of the autonomic managers in achieving preset performance goals geared towards satisfying a predefined Service Level Agreement for an Autonomic Web Services environment.