The Dawning of the Autonomic Computing Era

Ganek and Corbi

autonomic computing self management fault tolerance robust redundancy

@article{ganek:ibm-2003,
  title={The Dawning of the Autonomic Computing Era},
  author={Ganek, A.G. and Corbi, T.A.},
  journal={{IBM} Systems Journal},
  volume={42},
  number={1},
  pages={5--18},
  year={2003}
}

Terrible difficulty dealing with complexity of IT systems

• Too costly, error prone, inefficient
  • One third to one half of IT budgets spent on preventing or recovering from crashes
  • For every $1 spent on storage, you spend $9 managing it
• Systems frequently have dozens of applications, hundreds of components, thousands of tunable parameters
• Has become an issue as systems have grown in scale, heterogeneity, and criticality

Autonomic computing: Self managing systems to address complexity concerns

Automating operations, installation, dependency management, performance management

• Self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-protecting

Quote from Wladawsky-Berger is ridiculous: "... don't mean any far out AI project" but we need "behaving more like the 'intelligient' computer we all expect it to be"

Key properties

• Requires some amount of self-knowledge
• Configure and reconfigure itself under changing conditions
• Constantly optimizing
• Must heal, recovering from extraordinary events
• Must self-protect
• Must be situated in and aware of its environment
• Must interoperate and cooperate
• Anticipate user's needs and keep complexity hidden

Policy specifications will become important

Doesn't really hit on, and in fact minimizes, the AI challenges