Self-Aware Software and Systems Engineering: A Vision and Research Roadmap

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of virtualization and the transition towards cloud computing platforms, modern IT systems and services are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. The lack of direct control over the underlying physical hardware and the complex interactions between the applications sharing the physical infrastructure pose some major challenges in providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we present a research roadmap and a long-term vision aiming to address these challenges. The presented research agenda is pursued by the Descartes Research Group at KIT. Our long-term goal is to develop a novel methodology for engineering of next generation self-aware IT systems and services. The latter will have built-in service architecture models enhanced to capture dynamic aspects of the system environment and maintained automatically during operation. The models will be exploited at run-time to adapt the system to changes in the environment ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently and that QoS requirements are continuously satisfied.