Engineering of Next Generation Self-Aware Software Systems: A Research Roadmap.
Samuel Kounev · 2010
With the increasing adoption of virtualization and the transition towards cloud computing platforms, modern enterprise software systems are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. The lack of direct control over the underlying physical hardware and the resulting gap between logical and physical resource allocations pose some major challenges in providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Due to the inability to automatically keep track of the complex interactions between the applications and workloads sharing the physical infrastructure, modern enterprise systems often exhibit poor QoS and resource efficiency, and have high operating costs. In this paper, we present a research roadmap and a long-term vision aiming to address these challenges. The presented research agenda is pursued by the Descartes Research Group at KIT which is funded by the German Research Foundation within the Emmy Noether Programme. Our long-term goal is to develop a novel methodology for engineering of next generation self-aware software systems. The latter will have built-in QoS models enhanced to capture dynamic aspects of the system environment and maintained automatically during operation. The models will be exploited at run-time to adapt the system to changes in the environment ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently and that QoS requirements are continuously satisfied.