Dynamic Architecture for Autonomously Managing Service-Based Applications

Abstract

As a mega-trend in IT, cloud computing provides different types of cloud services. With these cloud services, a computing environment becomes very complex and heterogeneous since there are a large number of traditional and mobile applications and it is quite common for those applications to invoke the services. We call these applications as service-based applications. There are two potential problems with service-based applications; low QoS and limited manageability. To remedy the two problems, we propose a comprehensive framework for applying dynamic architecture and the concept of autonomic service management. This framework is called Service-based Ecosystem (SEco) where the configuration is dynamically changed to maintain the consistent level of the quality. To practically realize architectural dynamism, we first propose an autonomous management process and its key enabling methods on how to enable the architecture to be dynamic. We believe that dynamic architecture is an essential engineering technique in enabling truly autonomic management of quality in service-based applications.