Walking toward moving goalposts: agile management for evolving systems
Richard A. Golding, Theodore M. Wong · International Conference on Hot topics in autonomic computing · 2006
Much of the practical work in the autonomic management of storage systems has taken the bolt-on approach: take existing systems and add a separate management system on the side. While this approach can improve legacy systems, it has several problems, including scaling to heterogeneous and large systems and maintaining consistency between the system and the management model. We argue for a different approach, where autonomic management is woven throughout a system, as in the K2 distributed storage system that we are implementing. This distributes responsibility for management operations over all nodes according to ability and security, and stores management state as part of the entities being managed. Decision algorithms set general configuration goals and then let many system components work in parallel to move toward the goals.