2011 Third IEEE International Conference on Coud Computing Technology and Science

Autonomic Cloud Computing: giving intelligence to simpleton nodes

Patricia Takako Endo, Djamel Sadok, and Judith Kelner
Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) Research Group in Computer Network and Telecommunication (GPRT) Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil {patricia, jamel, jk}@gprt.ufpe.br

AbstractAutonomic Clouds emerge as a result of applying four self-management properties of Autonomic Computing (selfconfiguration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection) in Cloud environment. In this way, Autonomic Cloud Computing is seen as a Cloud with autonomy to take important decisions about resource management, such as the resource allocation for incoming requests, and the optimization decisions of resource utilization. The main goal of this paper is to make a brief discuss about issues of creating self-adaptive systems for Autonomic Clouds, focusing on infrastructure management level. Keywords- Cloud Computing; Autonomic Cloud; Resource Management System.

should be done to find an acceptable trade-off between the amount of control overhead and the frequency of resource information refreshing. According to previous work [1], the above monitoring may be passive or active. It is considered passive when there are one or more entities that are collecting information. The entity may continuously send polling messages to nodes asking for information or may do this on-demand when necessary. On the other hand, the monitoring is active when nodes are autonomous and may decide when to send asynchronously state information to some central entity.

I.

INTRODUCTION

The Cloud Computing providers should be able to attend unpredictable demands, managing its resources pool availability to appear to the user as boundless. Therefore, the system should automatically adapt its underlying hardware configuration to avoid violation of the services requirements. Current Cloud providers mainly rely on large and consolidated datacenters in order to offer their services. In this paper, the Resource Management System will be the research focus, since it is considered the most important operational system in the Cloud. The Resource Management System should be designed to take care of resource welfare, performing operational activities, such as allocation, control, and optimization. Additionally, the Resource Management System is also responsible for conceptual activities, such as resource modeling and offering. In a general way, there is a worker located at each node and a central manager responsible to control these workers. As shown in Figure 1, the central manager that may be a system receives users requests and is responsible to allocate these requests. To do this last task, the manager communicates with workers to know the current configuration of the infrastructure and then determines where and which resources will be used to better attend the requests. As can be noted, all intelligent is built-in in the central manager, while enforcement tasks are works. However, this centralized-fashion solution often suffers traditional and well-known problems, such as server bottleneck, and central failure point. Furthermore, the resource monitoring should be continuous and should help with allocation and reallocation decisions as part of overall resource usage optimization. A careful analysis
978-0-7695-4622-3/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.74 502

Figure 1. Centralized Resource Management This scenario is particularly suitable to be solved by Autonomic Computing, since its principles are focused on management systems capable to adapt their behavior according to the context with as minimal as possible human interaction. Furthermore, Autonomic Computing may turn the resource management more decentralized, distributing responsibilities and assuaging questions of centralized nature. This technological connivance results in the definition of what we called as Autonomic Clouds. Autonomic Clouds emerge as a result of applying four self-management properties: self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection autonomic methods to Cloud Computing. Techniques, such as biologically inspired computing, multiagent systems, evolutionary techniques, and many others, may be used with the goal to become Cloud systems into more robust, adaptable and easy to manage ones, and to improve