Asynchronous synthesis techniques for coordinating autonomic managers in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing allows the delivery of on-demand computing resources over the Internet on a pay-for-use basis. From a technical point of view, 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 article, we first present a simple language for expressing coordination constraints given a set of autonomic managers. Second, given a coordination expression written with that language, we propose new synthesis techniques for automatically generating an asynchronous controller. These synthesis techniques work in two steps by successively generating a model of the controller and a Java object corresponding to this model. This Java code is finally used for deploying the generated controller. As far as evaluation is concerned, we validated our approach by using it for coordinating real-world cloud applications. • A new approach for coordinating multiple autonomic managers for distributed cloud applications. • New synthesis techniques for generating centralised controllers in asynchronous environments (FIFO-based communication). • A fully automated tool support that covers the whole development process from the requirements to the final deployment of our solution. • The evaluation of our approach on real-world multi-tier Web applications.