Dependable Autonomic Cloud Computing with Information Proxies

Autonomic computing systems promise to manage themselves on a set of basic rules specified to higher level objectives. One of the challenges in making this possible is dependable collaboration among peers in a large-scale network. Effective maintenance of next generation distributed systems, such as clouds and second generation grids, will be nearly impossible without autonomic computing, with ever increasing scale of such systems. In addition, due to the nature of autonomous clouds to form administrative boundaries, depend able collaboration becomes a much harder problem. Employing information proxies may help improve such collaboration in existence of administrative boundaries. Although a general proxy definition can refer to many contexts, we focus on such proxies for dependable collaboration for distributed resource scheduling. Our definition of information proxies, and the particular areas we make use of them mainly contribute to the self configuring and self-optimizing fundamentals of the autonomic computing paradigm in general. By simulation, we show that information proxies help improve resource scheduling decisions that support large-scale autonomic computing systems.