Engineering of self-aware IT systems and services: State-of-the-art and research challenges

Abstract

Modern IT systems have highly distributed and dynamic architectures composed of loosely-coupled services typically deployed on virtualized infrastructures. Managing system resources in such environments to ensure acceptable end-to-end application Quality-of-Service (QoS) while at the same time optimizing resource utilization and energy efficiency is a challenge. The adoption of Cloud Computing technologies, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), comes at the cost of increased system complexity and dynamicity. This makes it hard to provide QoS guarantees in terms of performance and availability, as well as resilience to attacks and operational failures [8]. Moreover, the consolidation of workloads translates into higher utilization of physical resources which makes the system much more vulnerable to threats resulting from unforeseen load fluctuations, hardware failures and network attacks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.