Autonomic Computing Now You See It, Now You Don't

With the rapid growth of web services and socio-technical ecosystems, the management complexity of these modern, decentralized, distributed computing systems presents significant challenges for businesses and often exceeds the capabilities of human operators. Autonomic computing is an effective set of technologies, models, architecture patterns, standards, and processes to cope with and reign in the management complexity of dynamic computing systems using feedback control, adaptation, and self-management. At the core of an autonomic system are control loops which sense their environment, model their behavior in that environment, and take action to change the environment or their own behavior. Computer science researchers often approach the design of such highly dynamical systems from a software architecture perspective whereas engineering researchers start with a feedback control perspective. In this article, we argue that both design perspectives are needed and necessary for autonomic system design.