Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 28

IBM's mission was to enhance and impart systems with self-management
capabilities. Thus, systems are able to evolve in an autonomous manner, fix-
ing undesirable behaviors and adapting to their changing requirements and
environment. The level of autonomy given to a system is a product of the
ability to map the administration function to a machine-executable process,
and the ease of implementing such a process into the system. Accordingly,
the system administrators can delegate a part of their workload to the sys-
tem itself; consequently, they can focus on the system's fundamentals and
off-load more mundane tasks to the automatic administration software.
Moreover, administration tasks performed by the systems are of higher
quality, minimizing the possibility of introducing bugs during such mainte-
nance activities.
The benefits of autonomic computing are
• Decrease in maintenance risk and expenditure: The goal is to
obtain systems that are able to configure themselves automatically,
and with a potential to achieve zero configuration for the admin-
istrator, hence reducing costs. Thus, it enables a revaluation of
the human system administrator's tasks, allowing them to focus
on more strategic or value-adding aspects of the system support
function.
• Increase in service availability: Anticipation of potential problems
and automatic system diagnosis can provide increased applica-
tion dependability and other nonfunctional benefits. For instance,
increased security can enable the system to be better prepared to
counter malicious acts.
However, implementing autonomic computing systems is challenging
because it implies the following dimensions:
a. A computer system must be aware, that is, be able to keep some
knowledge about its envisaged goals, its past and current situation.
Accordingly, it has to assimilate some type of reasoning capabilities
to decide on corrective actions en route whenever needed.
b. A computer system should provide a high-level interface, allowing
human administrators to specify or modify system goals, tune rea-
soning processes, and oversee the system's ability to manage and
attain its objectives.
c. A computer system must be able to monitor itself at runtime in order
to know its internal situation. It must also be able to monitor part of
its execution environment to enable relevant evolutions.
d. A computer system must be able to adapt itself at runtime in order
to implement the requisite corrective administrative actions without
disrupting or engendering ongoing operations.