Optimal Autonomic Management of Service-Based Business Processes in the Cloud

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that provides hardware, platform and software resources as services over the internet in a pay-as-you-go model. It is being increasingly used for hosting and executing service-based business processes. These business processes are exposed to dynamic evolution during their life-cycle due to the highly dynamic evolution of cloud environments. The main adopted technique is to couple cloud computing with autonomic management in order to build autonomic computing systems. Almost all the existing approaches on autonomic computing have been focused on modeling and implementing autonomic mechanisms without paying any attention to the optimization of the autonomic management cost. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach based on binary linear program for determining the optimal allocation of cloud resources to manage a service-based business process which guarantees the specific requirements of customers and minimizes the management monetary cost. Then, to validate our approach under realistic conditions and inputs, we extend the CloudSim simulator to model and simulate the behaviour of business processes and their management in a cloud environment. Experiments conducted on two real datasets highlight the effectiveness of our approach.

NORA: An Approach for Transforming Network Management Policies into Automated Planning Problems

Realizing autonomic management control loops is pivotal for achieving self-driving networks. Some studies have recently evidence the feasibility of using Automated Planning (AP) to carry out these loops. However, in practice, the use of AP is complicated since network administrators, who are non-experts in Artificial Intelligence, need to define network management policies as AP-goals and combine them with the network status and network management tasks to obtain AP-problems. AP planners use these problems to build up autonomic solutions formed by primitive tasks that modify the initial network state to achieve management goals. Although recent approaches have investigated transforming network management policies expressed in specific languages into low-level configuration rules, transforming these policies expressed in natural language into AP-goals and, subsequently, build up AP-based autonomic management loops remains unexplored. This paper introduces a novel approach, called NORA, to automatically generate AP-problems by translating Goal Policies expressed in natural language into AP-goals and combining them with both the network status and the network management tasks. NORA uses Natural Language Processing as the translation technique and templates as the combination technique to avoid network administrators to learn policy languages or AP-notations. We used a dataset containing Goal Policies to evaluate the NORA’s prototype. The results show that NORA achieves high precision and spends a short-time on generating AP-problems, which evinces NORA aids to overcome barriers to using AP in autonomic network management scenarios.

Security and Autonomic Management in System of Systems

A system of systems integrates systems that function independently but are networked together for a period of time to achieve a higher goal. These systems evolve over time and have emergent properties. Therefore, even with security controls in place, it is difficult to maintain a required level of security for the system of systems as a whole because uncertainties may arise at runtime. Uncertainties can occur from internal factors, such as malfunctions of a system, or from external factors, such as malicious attacks. Self-adaptation is an approach that allows a system to adapt in the face of such uncertainties without human intervention. This work outlines the progress made towards security mitigation in system of systems using a generic autonomic management system to assist engineers in developing self-adaptive systems. The manuscript describes the proposed system design, its implementation as part of the Eclipse Arrowhead framework, and its functionality in a smart agriculture use case. The system is designed and implemented in such a way that it can be reused and extended for a variety of use cases without requiring major changes.

Autonomic Management Framework for Cloud-Native Applications

In order to meet the rapidly changing requirements of the Cloud-native dynamic execution environment, without human support and without the need to continually improve one’s skills, autonomic features need to be added. Embracing automation at every layer of performance management enables us to reduce costs while improving outcomes. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of autonomic management requirements of Cloud-native applications. We propose that the automation is achieved via high-level policies. In turn autonomy features are accomplished via the rule engine support. First, the paper presents the engineering perspective of building a framework for Autonomic Management of Cloud-Native Applications, namely AMoCNA, in accordance with Model Driven Architecture (MDA) concepts. AMoCNA has many desirable features whose main goal is to reduce the complexity of managing Cloud-native applications. The presented models are, in fact, meta-models, being technology agnostic. Secondly, the paper demonstrates one possibility of implementing the aforementioned design procedures. The presented AMoCNA implementation is also evaluated to identify the potential overhead introduced by the framework.