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Future Enterprise - Autonomic Computing Systems
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
For service providers to cope with the growing scale, complexity and time constraints of applications, supporting systems must become largely automatic- that is capable of managing their own operation with minimum human intervention. Such self-management is a hallmark of autonomic computing systems.
Operations are planned in accordance with higher-level planning objectives, which are represented by utility functions that users can specify in terms of their own clearly defined operational metrics. Utility functions are attractive for achieving autonomic computing because they provide a basis for converting higher-level performance metrics to lower-level system control parameters.
Web based services such as online banking and shopping are hosted on distributed computing systems, comprising heterogeneous and networked servers and are therefore ideal candidates for self-management. To operate such systems efficiently while satisfying stringent QoS requirements, performance related parameters must be selected, capable of adapting to changing operating conditions. For example, the computational workload which a system must process might vary over time, with the possibility that hardware or software resources could fail or need replacing during system operation.
Current work on self-managing systems generally aims to re-engineer human expert domain knowledge in the form of automated rules, applying artificial intelligence techniques to achieve real-time performance optimisation.
Key management tasks which can be automated in computing systems include- power management, load balancing, configuration and dynamic resource provisioning. Properties common to all autonomic systems will therefore cover- self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimisation and self-protection.
An autonomic data centre of the future might host a number of applications or services on behalf of multiple customers. A customer might subscribe to a new service and specify preferred levels of performance and security criteria defined in an SLA. The Centre will automatically provision and configure the appropriate server, database, storage and networking resources to achieve those criteria and install and configure domain-specific software governing the resources. The Centre will then monitor and manage itself- sensing and safeguarding against faults, bottlenecks and attacks.
Future trends
Autonomic computing is quickly becoming an accepted practice and will dominate all scales of real-time computing in the future – from the Internet’s global operation, to Grid and Cloud computer networks to PC clusters.
This capability will eventually combine with autonomic software management to achieve complete automatic system management.
Autonomic computing will also be an important step on the path to the Adaptable Enterprise, which will require new web service building and maintenance capacity which is fast and seamless, to take advantage of rapidly evolving market opportunities.
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