Synchronization of multiple autonomic control loops: Application to cloud computing

Abstract

Over the past years, Autonomic Computing has become very popular, especially in scenarios of Cloud Computing, where there might be several autonomic loops aiming at turning each layer of the cloud stack more autonomous, adaptable and aware of the runtime environment. Nevertheless, due to conflicting objectives, non-synchronized autonomic loops may lead to global inconsistent states. For instance, in order to maintain its Quality of Service, an application provider might request more and more resources while the infrastructure provider, due to power shortage may be forced to reduce the resource provisioning. In this paper, we propose a generic model to deal with the synchronization and coordination of autonomic loops and how it can be applied in the context of Cloud Computing. We present some simulation results to show the scalability and feasibility of our proposal. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.