The vision of autonomic computing

TLDR

The 2001 IBM manifesto warned that software complexity, driven by millions of lines of code and heterogeneous environments, threatens computing progress and highlighted autonomic computing as a key strategy for building self‑managing systems. Autonomic computing enables systems to self‑manage by interpreting high‑level administrator objectives, aligning operations with those goals, and allowing new components to integrate seamlessly like cells in a body.

Abstract

A 2001 IBM manifesto observed that a looming software complexity crisis -caused by applications and environments that number into the tens of millions of lines of code - threatened to halt progress in computing. The manifesto noted the almost impossible difficulty of managing current and planned computing systems, which require integrating several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems that extend into the Internet. Autonomic computing, perhaps the most attractive approach to solving this problem, creates systems that can manage themselves when given high-level objectives from administrators. Systems manage themselves according to an administrator's goals. New components integrate as effortlessly as a new cell establishes itself in the human body. These ideas are not science fiction, but elements of the grand challenge to create self-managing computing systems.