Towards Self-Testing in Autonomic Computing Systems

As researchers and members of the IT industry move towards a vision of computing systems that manage themselves, it is imperative to investigate ways to dynamically validate these systems to avoid the high cost of system failures. Although research continues to advance in many areas of autonomic computing, there is a lack of development in the area of testing these types of systems at runtime. Self-managing features in autonomic systems dynamically invoke changes to the structure and behavior of components that may already be operating in an unpredictable environment; further emphasizing the need for runtime testing. In this paper we propose a framework that dynamically validates changes in autonomic computing systems. Our framework extends the current structure of autonomic computing systems to include self-testing as an implicit characteristic. We validate our framework by creating a prototype of an autonomic container that incorporates the ability to self-test