Abstract: Many applications have taken advantage of cloud provided autonomic capabilities, commonly auto-scaling, to harness easily available compute capacity to maintain performance against defined quality objectives. This has caused the management complexity of enterprise applications to increase. It is now common for an application to be a collection of autonomic sub-systems. However, combining individual autonomic systems to create an application can lead to behaviors that negatively impact the global aggregate utility of the application and in some cases can be conflicting and self-destructive. Commonly, human administrators address these behaviors as part of a design time analysis of the situation or a run time mitigation of the undesired effects. However, the task of controlling and mitigating undesirable behaviors is complex and error prone. To handle the complexity of managing a collection of autonomic systems we have previously proposed an automated approach to the creation of a higher level autonomic management system, referred to as a Meta-Manager. In this paper, we improve upon prior work with a more streamlined and understandable formal representation of the approach, expand its capabilities to include global knowledge, and test its potential applicability and effectiveness by managing the complexity of a collection of autonomic systems in a case study of a major outage suffered by the Google Cloud Platform.

Abstract: Modern enterprise IT systems are increasingly becoming compositions of many subsystems each of which is an autonomic system. These individual autonomic systems act independently to maintain their locally defined SLAs but can take actions which are inconsistent with and potentially detrimental to the global system objective. Currently, human administrators intervene to resolve these conflicts but are challenged by complexity in the prediction of current and future states of the constituent systems and their managers, multiple conflicting quality dimensions which may change over time, combinatorially large configuration space across the set of constituent systems, and the time critical nature of the decisions to be made to prevent further degradation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an approach that enables the creation of a higher level autonomic system, referred to as a meta-manager, that does not subsume the control functions nor does it directly orchestrate the actions of the sub-autonomic managers. Instead, we encapsulate and abstract the behavior of each subsystem as a parameterized adaptation policy which can be adjusted by the meta-manager to tune the adaptive behavior of the subsystem adaptation. We can effectively instantiate this idea by considering each of the subsystems as a player in a stochastic multi-player game against it’s local environment, and synthesize an adaptation strategy using off-the-shelf tools for stochastic game analysis.