Asynchronous Coordination of Stateful Autonomic Managers in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing is now an omnipresent paradigm in modern programming. Cloud applications usually consist of several software components deployed on remote virtual machines. Managing such applications is a challenging problem because manual administration is no longer realistic for these complex distributed systems. Thus, autonomic computing is a promising solution for monitoring and updating these applications automatically. This is achieved through the automation of administration functions and the use of control loops called autonomic managers. An autonomic manager observes the environment, detects changes, and reconfigures dynamically the application. Multiple autonomic managers can be deployed in the same system and must make consistent decisions. Using them without coordination may lead to inconsistencies and error-prone situations. In this paper, we present our approach for coordinating stateful autonomic managers, which relies on a simple coordination language, new techniques for asynchronous controller synthesis and Java code generation. We used our approach for coordinating real-world cloud applications.