Reconfigurable service-oriented architecture for autonomic computing

Almost a decade has passed since the objectives and benefits of autonomic computing were stated, yet even the latest system designs and deployments exhibit only lim-ited and isolated elements of autonomic functionality. In previous work, we identified several of the key challenges behind this delay in the adoption of autonomic solutions, and proposed a generic framework for the development of autonomic computing systems that overcomes these chal-lenges. In this article, we describe how existing tech-nologies and standards can be used to realise our auto-nomic computing framework, and present its implementa-tion as a service-oriented architecture. We show how this implementation employs a combination of automated code generation, model-based and object-oriented development techniques to ensure that the framework can be used to add autonomic capabilities to systems whose characteris-tics are unknown until runtime. We then use our frame-work to develop two autonomic solutions for the allocation of server capacity to services of different priorities and vari-able workloads, thus illustrating its application in the con-text of a typical data-centre resource management problem