Autonomic Computing

Autonomic Manager Collaboration

If the IT systems of the future are to achieve the goals we have set for autonomous computing, the control loops and their autonomic managers must be able to collaborate, communicate, and negotiate. For example, a Web-based application must access data from a shared database through a Web server, store new data entered by site users, verify the accuracy of that data, and so on.

To illustrate the collaboration needed within autonomic managers consider the following example. We have an IT system consisting of a customer order entry application, which accepts online customer orders for products and updates databases that reside on several different servers. As orders are accepted through the order entry application, ...