Autonomic Control of On-the-Cloud Applications for Distributed Collaborative Systems

On-the-Cloud computing became an establish domain of research which materialized in a variety of *as a Service applications. One of the issues with cloud computing relates to the complexity of the IT operations needed to install and maintain the *as a Service infrastructure. Autonomic Computing Systems have been seen as a solution for providing the “*as a Service” with self management, due to their ability to configure, optimize, heal and protect themselves with little to no human intervention. The Autonomic systems must be able to analyze themselves and their environment -the *as a Service infrastructurein order to determine how best they can achieve the high-level goals and policies given to them by system managers. Previous work on Autonomic Systems has focused on management of resources which are collocated in the same datacenter. However, new services like Content Delivery Networks require that the servers which provide the service be distributed across different datacenters. At the same time web applications are increasingly used for people to collaborate within the same organization or among organizations. This paper focuses on the issues related to the design and implementation of an Autonomic Computing infrastructure specially built for autonomically managing an *as a Service system by applying known patterns from real-time control to the on-the-cloud deployed collaborative application. The autonomic system architecture for the self-management of on-the-cloud distributed applications is approached through an abstract application model while real-time control patterns are applied to the combination of the self-* parts of the architecture and the on-the-cloud distributed application. The test bed for a practical deployment of such a system together with some tests performed, are provided at the end of this paper.