M.Sc.

Seminar Proposal

On

Autonomic Computing: An Evidence of Better Management Platform

By

Benjamin, Ebimobowei

PG/PSC1614980

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE,

FACULTY OF PHYSICAL SCIENCES,

UNIVERSITY OF BENIN,

BENIN CITY.
 Abstract
The increasing complexity, heterogeneity, dynamism and interconnectivity in software

applications, services and networks has led to complex, unmanageable and insecure systems.

This complexity has increased the cost and errors of managing information technology

infrastructures, as well as, threatens to undermine the benefits information technology aims to

provide. All these issues has necessitated the search for an alternate paradigm of system and

application design, which can based on biological systems strategies, to deal with similar

challenges of scale, complexity, heterogeneity, and uncertainty – a vision that has been

referred to as autonomic computing. "Autonomic Computing" is a term describing an approach

and solution set that collectively add self-managing and self-adapting capabilities to

Information Technology systems. Autonomic Computing is gaining awareness and acceptance in

several fields due to its practical relevance in computing systems improvement. This seminar

report presents an overview to autonomic computing, its architecture, and promises to future

applications.
 INTRODUCTION

1.1 RESEARCH BACKGROUND

The advent and evolution of networks and Internet, which has delivered ubiquitous services

with extensive scalability and flexibility, continues to make computing environments more

complex (Salehie and Tahvildari, 2005). Moreover, Advances in networking and computing

technology and software tools have resulted in an explosive growth in networked applications

and information services that cover all aspects of our life (Parashar and Hariri, 2005). These

sophisticated applications and services are extremely complex, heterogeneous and dynamic.

This increasing complexity is overwhelming the capabilities of software developers and system

administrators, who design, evaluate, integrate, and manage these systems (Ganek, 2006).

Several researchers such as Kluth (2004) are of the opinion that for a technology to be truly

successful, its complexity has to disappear. Today, many computing systems include complex

infrastructures and operate in complex heterogeneous environments. With the proliferation of

handheld devices, the ever-expanding spectrum of users, and the emergence of the

information economy with the advent of the Web, computing vendors have difficulty providing

an infrastructure to address all the needs of users, devices, and applications. Service-Oriented

Architecture with Web services as their core technology try to address some of this issues,

hereby raising numerous complexity issues (Muller et al., 2006).

Meanwhile, Information Technology (IT) is called upon to deliver business services at higher

speed and minimum cost. These services must be integrated into the existing infrastructures
which lead to increase the complexity. Today, IT organizations face severe challenges in

managing complexity due to cost, time and relying on human experts. The growing complexity

of the IT infrastructure threatens to undermine the benefits information technology aims to

provide (Hariri, 2004). According to Patterson (2002), the labor costs outstrip equipment by

factors of 3 to 18, depending on the type of system, and one third to one half of the total

budget is spent preventing or recovering from crashes. All these issues has necessitated the

investigation of an alternate paradigm for system and application design, which is based on

strategies used by biological systems to deal with similar challenges of scale, complexity,

heterogeneity, and uncertainty – a vision that has been referred to as autonomic computing

(Hariri and Parashar, 2005).

Autonomic Computing is a term describing an approach and solution set that collectively add

self-managing and self-adapting capabilities to Information Technology systems. Autonomic

systems are designed to take over routine, repetitive and manually intensive IT operations tasks

that IT professionals choose to delegate (Mittal et al, 2014). Autonomic Computing helps to

address complexity by using technology to manage technology. The term Autonomic

Computing (AC) in general has been inspired by the human autonomic nervous system. Its

overarching goal is to enable computing systems to autonomously deal with “unpredictable

change”, so as to fulfill the objectives they were constructed for. In other words, to realize

computer and software systems and applications that can manage themselves in accordance

with high-level guidance from humans. As a result, major software and system vendors

continues to create autonomic, dynamic, or self-managing systems by developing methods,

architecture models, middleware, algorithms, and policies to mitigate the complexity problem.
Instrumenting software systems with autonomic technology will allow us to monitor or verify

requirements (functional or nonfunctional) over long periods of time. For example, self-

managing systems will be able to monitor and control the brittleness of legacy systems, provide

automatic updates to evolve installed software, adapt safety-critical systems without halting

them, immunize computers against malware automatically, facilitate enterprise integration

with self-managing integration mechanisms, document architectural drift by equipping systems

with architecture analysis frameworks, and keep the values of quality attributes within desired

ranges (Want et al., 2003).

By attacking the software complexity problem through technology simplification and

automation, autonomic computing promises to solve software evolution problems. This

research provides an overview of the autonomic environment and discusses some of the

possibilities regarding how this technology might be able to adapt to changes in the evolving

software crises and to take advantage of technology to better accomplish the needs of software

developers. So, by embedding autonomic principles into existing system architecture, we can

move one step further for achieving success.

1.2 STATEMENT OF RESEARCH PROBLEM

Over the past era, the expeditious surge in computer technology has helped to produce more

strained hardware and software applications. As a result, long term feasibility and sustainability

are usually ignored which, results in “ball-of-mud‟ applications where peripherals have been

added in a continued manner without paying any sort of attention to the resulting complex

system integrity (Foote and Yoder, 2000).

The increasing heterogeneity, dynamism and interconnectivity in software applications,

services and networks led to complex, unmanageable and insecure systems. This complexity

has also increased the cost and errors of managing IT infrastructures. The skilled persons who

manage these systems are expensive and cannot manage them in configuration, healing,

optimization, protection and maintenance, and IT support costs are skyrocketing. According to

a recent study commissioned by IBM Tivoli, approximately 70% of today's IT budget is labor

(Mittal et al, 2014). Since IT is increasingly fundamental to revenue, companies are facing a

growth versus cost dilemma. This necessitated IT managers to look for ways to improve the

Return on Investment by reducing the Total Cost of Ownership, improving Quality of Services

and reducing the cost for managing of IT complexity. On this platform, this research is based.

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Two research questions were raised to guide the study.

RQ1: How does Autonomic Computing enables future applications?

RQ2: Is there any impact of Autonomic Computing on people, organizations and society at

large?

1.4 RESEARCH AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

The aim of this research was to expose and justify the solution to software complexity problem.

This it achieved with the following objectives:

a) Exposed the concept of Autonomous Computing.

 b) Show How Autonomous Computing differs from the Contemporary.

c) Exposed the benefits of building autonomic systems on people, organizations and

society at large.

1.5 RESEARCH SCOPE

This research is restricted only to finding a dynamic approach to attacking the software

complexity problem through technology simplification and automation. Hence, this research

focuses on autonomous computing from the perspective of software applications.

1.6 RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE

The findings of this research will provide knowledge and understanding about the concept of

autonomous computing as viable solution to software crises. Moreover, it will also be helpful to

developers to decide on the principle to adopt for their software projects.

1.7 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The research process includes:

a) Literature review: This step allows the researcher to obtain more information through

the reviewed literature. Literatures will be reviewed in order to obtain more information

so that the researcher could identify how much issues have been tackled in other
 situations. The literature review process involved: Search engines such as Google

Scholar, the contents pages of relevant journals and websites of relevant organizations.

This process resulted in the following:

i. Compiling information on some highly relevant autonomic environment, most of

which were used in the literature review.

ii. Critically reviewing and then synthesizing the most relevant literature to identify

the key challenges and factors as well as strategies that contribute to the

sustainability, viability and success autonomic applications.

b) Preparing a draft report on the research study.

REFERENCES

Foote, B. and Yoder, J (2000). “Big Ball of Mud”, in Pattern Languages of Program Design 4, ed. N.
Harrison, B. Foote, H. Rohnert, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Ganek, A. (2006). Overview of Autonomic Computing: Origins, Evolution, Direction, in Autonomic

Computing – Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications.

Hariri, S. (2004). Autonomic computing: research challenges and opportunities. In Proceedings of

IEEE conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS), page 7, 2004.

Hariri, S. and Parashar. M. (2005). Handbook of Bioinspired Algorithms and Applications, chapter
The Foundations of Autonomic Computing. CRC Press LLC, 2005.

Kluth, A. (2004). “Survey: Information Technology. Make It Simple.” The Economist.

http://www.economist.com/surveys /showsurvey.cfm?issue=20041030

Mittal, P., Singhal, A., and Bansal, A. (2014). A Study on Architecture of Autonomic Computing-
Self Managed Systems. International Journal of Computer Applications 92: (6), 6 - 9.
Müller, H. A.; Brien, L.; Klein, M. and Wood, B. (2006). Autonomic Computing. Carnegie Mellon
University, Technical Note CMU/SEI-2006-TN-006, 2006. Downloadable
from:http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/06tn006.pdf [last accessed 14.1.2016]

Parashar, M. and Hariri, S. (2005). Autonomic computing: An overview. Hot Topics, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005. Pp. 247-259. Available @
www.caip.rutgers.edu/TASSL/Papers/automate-upp-overview-05.pdf.

Patterson, D. (2000).Recovery oriented computing (roc): Motivation, definition, techniques, and

case studies. UC Berkeley CS Tech. Rep. UCB/CSD-02-1175, March 2002.

Salehie, M. and Tahvildari, L. (2005). “Autonomic Computing: Emerging Trends and open
Problems” DEAS‟05 St Louis, Missouri USA. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. 30
(4), 1- 7.

Want, R., Pering, T., and Tennenhouse, D. (2003). “Comparing autonomic and proactive
computing,” IBM systems journal, 42: (1) , 2003.