The Autonomic Computing Paradigm

The advances in computing and communication technologiesand software tools have resulted in an explosive growth innetworked applications and information services that coverall aspects of our life. These services and applications are in-herently complex, dynamic and heterogeneous. In a similarway, the underlying information infrastructure, e.g. the In-ternet, is large, complex, heterogeneous and dynamic, glob-allyaggregatinglargenumbersofindependentcomputingandcommunication resources, data stores and sensor networks.The combination of the two results in application develop-ment, configuration and management complexities that breakcurrent computing paradigms, which are based on static be-haviors, interactions and compositions of components and/orservices.Asaresult,applications,programmingenvironmentsand information infrastructures are rapidly becoming brittle,unmanageable and insecure. This has led researchers to con-sider alternative programming paradigms and managementtechniques that are based on strategies used by biological sys-tems to deal with complexity, dynamism, heterogeneity anduncertainty.Autonomiccomputingisinspiredbythehumanautonomicnervoussystemthathandlescomplexityanduncertainties,andaims at realizing computing systems and applications capableof managing themselves with minimum human intervention.In this paper we first give an overview of the architecture