Shoaling Glassfishes: Enabling Decentralized Web Service Management

The steadily increasing size and complexity of distributed software systems demand the systematic construction of self-managing software architectures that reduce administrative overheads. Self-adaptive architectures are typically conceived by introducing managing entities which establish closed-loop control mechanism. Here, we propose a fully decentralized, agent-based management architecture that utilizes self-organizing dynamics to address resource allocation / service deployment problems within sets of J2EE application servers. Adaptivity is enabled by equipping servers as well as service endpoints with locally interacting management agents that cooperate due to decentralized coordination strategies. We present the decentralized management architecture, outline the utilized programming model and conclude with system simulation results.