Autonomia: an autonomic computing environment

The proliferation of Internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current networked system designs, and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. In fact, we have reached a level of complexity, heterogeneity, and a rapid change rate that our information infrastructure is becoming unmanageable and insecure. This had led researchers to consider alternative designs and management techniques that are based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with complexity, heterogeneity and uncertainty. The approach is referred to as autonomic computing. An autonomic computing system is the system that has the capabilities of being self-defining, self-healing, self-configuring, self-optimizing, etc. We present our approach to implement an autonomic computing infrastructure, Autonomia that provides dynamically programmable control and management services to support the development and deployment of smart (intelligent) applications. The Autonomia environment provides the application developers with all the tools required to specify the appropriate control and management schemes to maintain any quality of service requirement or application attribute/functionality (e.g., performance, fault, security, etc.) and the core autonomic middleware services to maintain the autonomic requirements of a wide range of network applications and services. We have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept prototype system that can support the self-configuring, self-deploying and self-healing of any networked application.