Autonomic
System Administration
DANIEL
HAGIMONT
Objectives
Today's computing environments are
becoming increasingly sophisticated. They involve numerous complex
software that cooperate in potentially large scale distributed
environments. These software are developed with very heterogeneous
programming models and their configuration facilities are generally
proprietary. Therefore, the administration of these software
(installation, configuration, tuning, repair …) is a much complex task
which consumes a lot of resources:
- human resources as administrators have to react to events (such
as failures) and have to reconfigure (repair) complex applications,
- hardware resources which are often reserved (and overbooked) to
anticipate load peaks or failures.
A very promising approach to the
above issue is to implement administration as an autonomic software.
Such a software can be used to deploy and configure applications in a
distributed environment. It can also monitor the environment and react
to events such as failures or overloads and reconfigure applications
accordingly and autonomously. The main advantages of this approach are:
- Providing a high-level support for deploying and configuring
applications reduces errors and administrator's efforts.
- Autonomic administration allows the required reconfigurations to
be performed without human intervention, thus saving administrator's
time.
- Autonomic administration is a means to save hardware resources as
resources can be allocated only when required (dynamically upon failure
or load peak) instead of pre-allocated.
The goal of this project
(called Jade) is to design and prototype an environment for developing
autonomic administration software. Our preliminary research in Jade
allowed us to identify the following key design choices:
- A component model. Jade should models the administrated
environment as a component-based software architecture which provides
means to configure and reconfigure the environment. The same model
should used for developing the administration software itself, thus
enabling self-administration.
- A system representation which provides a consistent and reliable
view of the whole administrated system.
- Control loops which link probes to reconfiguration services and
implement autonomic behaviors.
Our current favorite
application domain is that of clustered J2EE application. These
applications rely on very complex software (e.g. Apache, Tomcat, Jonas,
Mysql) and their deployment and administration should greatly benefit
from Jade.
We are currently investigating the challenge of applying this approach
to the management of large scale infrastructures in the area of Grid
computing.
Related papers
[5.25] N. de
Palma, S. Jean, S. Ben
Atallah, D. Hagimont, J2EE
Applications Deployment: A first Experiment, International
Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and
Applications (PDPTA’04), Las Vegas, June 2004. [PDF]
[5.28] S.
Bouchenak, F. Boyer, D.
Hagimont, S. Krakowiak, N. Depalma, V. Quéma, J.-B.
Stefani, Architecture-Based Autonomous Repair Management:
Application to J2EE Clusters, 2nd International Conference on
Autonomic Computing (ICAC) - short paper, Seattle, June 2005.
[5.30]
S.
Bouchenak, F. Boyer, D.
Hagimont, S. Krakowiak, A. Mos, N. Depalma, V. Quema, J.-B.
Stefani, Architecture-Based Autonomous Repair Management: An
Application to J2EE Clusters, 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable
Distributed Systems (SRDS), Orlando, Florida, October 2005. [PDF]
[5.31] S. Sicard, N.
Depalma, D. Hagimont, J2EE Server
Scalability through EJB Replication, ACM Symposium on Applied
Computing (SAC), Special Track on Distributed
Systems and Grid Computing, Dijon, France, April 2006. [PDF]
[5.32] J. Philippe,
N.
Depalma, S. Bouchenak, J. Kornas, D. Hagimont, Offline Profiling for
Guaranteed Performance in Multi-Tiered Web Applications, International
Conference on Internet Computing, Las
Vegas, USA, June 2006. [PDF]
[5.33] D.
Hagimont, S.
Bouchenak, N. De Palma, C. Taton, Autonomic Management of Clustered Applications, IEEE International Conference on Cluster
Computing, Barcelona September 25th-28th, 2006. [PDF]
[5.34] B.
Claudel, N. De
Palma, R. Lachaize, D. Hagimont, Self-protection for Distributed Component-Based Applications,
Eighth International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and
Security of Distributed Systems
, Dallas,
USA, November 2006.
[PDF]
[7.8] S. Ben Atallah, D.
Hagimont, S. Jean, N. de Palma, A first step towards
autonomous clustered J2EE applications management, First
International Workshop on Operating Systems, Programming Environments
and Management Tools for High-Performance Computing on Clusters,
Saint-Malo, June 2004. [PDF]
[7.9] S.
Bouchenak, N. de Palma,
D. Hagimont, Autonomic
administration of clustered J2EE applications, IFIP/IEEE
International Workshop on Self-Managed Systems & Services, Nice,
May 2005. [PDF]
[7.10] C. Taton, S. Bouchenak, F. Boyer, NI de Palma, D.
Hagimont and A. Mos, Self-Manageable Replicated Servers. In VLDB
Workshop on Design, Implementation, and Deployment of Database
Replication (WDIDDR), at 31st International Conference on Very Large
Data Bases, Trondheim, Norway, August 2005. [PDF]
[7.11] C. Taton, S. Bouchenak, N. Depalma, D. Hagimont, S. Sicard,
Self-Sizing of Clustered Databases, 2nd IEEE International
Workshop on Autonomic Communications and Computing (ACC 2006),
Niagara-Falls, June 2006. [PDF]
Presentation slides
- Presentation at the Lego ANR project [PDF]
- Presentation at the SelfMan workshop [PDF]
Funding supports
This research project at IRIT is funded through several ANR (french
National Research Agency) projects:
- Lego: algorithms and software for large-scale infrastructures
- Selfware: middlware support for autonomic administration of
legacy software infrastructures
- Scorware : middlware support for SCA-based infrastuctures (SCA
stands for Service Component Architecture)
Contact
Daniel Hagimont
Web : http://www.enseeiht.fr/~hagimont
Email : Daniel.Hagimont@enseeiht.fr
Phone : (+33) 561 588 383 (GMT+1)
Fax : (+33) 561 588 306