Self-TUNe-ing of a J2EE Clustered Application

The Java 2 platform, enterprise edition (J2EE) defines a model for developing multi-tier distributed applications, such as e-commerce applications. Such applications are typically composed of a Web server, a servlet server, optionally an EJB server and a database server. Clusters allow replication of each tier instance, thus providing an appropriate infrastructure for high availability and scalability. However, such applications are complex to administrate and often lack deployment and reconfiguration tools. Moreover, the fact that management tasks are performed by humans leads to many configuration errors and low reactivity. To address this issue, we designed and implemented an autonomic management system which provides an environment for deploying and autonomously reconfiguring distributed applications as required. The main principle is to wrap legacy software pieces in components in order to administrate a software infrastructure as a component architecture. Several languages (textual, graphical) are introduced to describe deployment and reconfiguration policies. This paper presents an overview of the tune autonomic management system and focuses on its application to the management of a clustered J2EE application.