Autonomic Resource Virtualization in Cloud-like Environments

Cloud computing is a newly emerged computing infrastructure that builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid computing, Service-oriented computing, business process management and virtualization. An important characteristic of Cloud-based services is the provision of non-functional guarantees in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as guarantees on execution time or price. However, due to system malfunctions, changing workload conditions, hardand software failures, established SLAs can be violated. In order to avoid costly SLA violations, flexible and adaptive SLA attainment strategies are needed. In this paper we investigate the application of autonomic computing to SLA-based resource virtualization considering a three-layered Cloud based infrastructure including agreement negotiation, service brokering and deployment using virtualization. For each layer we exemplify how the principles of autonomic computing can be applied to achieve component self-management.