Collaborative policy-based autonomic management: In a hierarchical model

In this paper we address some of the main challenges in collaboration between different autonomic managers in a policy-based management environment. We focus on three main questions: how should managers collaborate with each other, when do they need to collaborate and what information do they need to exchange in communication. In our initial investigation, we explore a hierarchical model for organizing the autonomic managers. We evaluate the approach via a prototype inspired by cloud providers' virtualized infrastructure and show how collaboration between managers in a hierarchy can improve the response time of a web server and avoid SLA violations.