Self-awareness of Cloud Applications

Cloud applications today deliver an increasingly larger portion of the information and communications technology (ICT) services. To address the scale, growth, and reliability of cloud applications, self-aware management and scheduling are becoming commonplace. How are they used in practice? In this chapter, we propose a conceptual framework for analyzing the state-of-the-art self-awareness approaches used in the context of cloud applications. We map important applications corresponding to the popular and emerging application domains to this conceptual framework and compare the practical characteristics, benefits, and drawbacks of self-awareness approaches. Last, we propose a road map for addressing the open challenges in self-aware cloud and datacenter applications.