A platform to enable self-adaptive cloud applications using trustworthiness properties

Abstract

Self-Adaptive Systems (SASs) reflect on both their state and on the environment and change their behavior to satisfy the expected objectives. Cloud systems are self-adaptive by nature, especially considering the resources used in a pay-as-you-go manner. Satisfying trustworthiness (worthiness of a service based on evidences of its trust) properties also demands self-adaptation capabilities. Unfortunately, developers lack an easy-to-use platform to support the assessment of such properties and to execute the required adaptions. This paper presents TMA, a platform that implements a MAPE-K control loop for cloud systems, supported by a distributed monitoring system based on probes. Quality Models are used to express trustworthiness properties, resulting in scores, which are used to plan adaptations through evaluation rules. These plans are executed by actuators. A demo shows the scaling up/down of the number of containers in a cloud application of a set of web services from TPC Benchmarks, as a result of changes observed in the environment.