Complexity of Composability of Configuration Management

The explosion of information and integration of technology into everyday life has brought on new demands for how people manage and maintain computer systems. Demand is already outpacing supply when it comes to managing complex computer systems. There are burst of activities to ease the burden of configuration management such as autonomic computing. In this paper, we address fundamental theory of autonomic systems. We define and discuss various kinds of limits (convergence, idempotence, statelessness, etc) on configuration operations. We define general and special cases of composability of configuration operations and show that the act of selecting or composing the appropriate operations or operation sequences from an operation repository is NP-complete and the problem remains NP-complete regardless of whether operations have those limits. We examine how current strategies for configuration management reduce complexity. We also suggest a number of ways to reduce the difficulty of composability. Many of these ways are ways in which other NP-complete problems have been shown to be easy in certain cases, i.e., choosing easy instances, forming hierarchies and relationships, approximation, dynamic