Autonomic computing: A fuzzy control approach towards application development

Autonomic computing (Salehie & Tahvildari, 2005) is a new paradigm to design, develop, deploy, and manage systems by taking inspiration from strategies used by biological systems. An autonomic system has four major characteristics: self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize, and self-protect. The autonomic computing architecture provides a blueprint for developing feedback control loops for self-managing systems. This observation suggests that control theory might provide guidance as to the structure of and requirements for autonomic managers. E-commerce is an area where an Autonomic Computing system could be very effectively deployed. E-commerce has created demand for high quality information technology services, and businesses seek ways to improve the quality of service in a cost-effective way. Properly adjusting tuning parameters for best values is time-consuming and skills-intensive. This chapter describes simulation environments to implement approaches to automate the tuning of MaxClients parameter of Apache web server using fuzzy controllers. These are illustrations of the self-optimizing characteristic of an autonomic computing system.