Paving the Way for Autonomic Clouds: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Cloud Computing is the core technology that helps in catering to the computing needs of the current generation. As the customers increase, data center providers are looking for efficient mechanisms to handle the management of the large reservoir of resources involved in the Cloud environment. In order to support efficient managing, it is the need of the day to adopt the concept of Autonomic Computing into Cloud. Several researchers have been attempted to improve the managing capability of the Cloud, by encorporating autonomic capabilities for resources in the Cloud. Most of the researches attempt to automate some aspects while the remaining portion of the Cloud does not have autonomic functionalities. An autonomic Cloud is one where all the operations can be handled without human intervention. There is a long way to go to achieve this vision. In our study, we first categorize the various existing approaches on the basis of the methodology employed and analyze the different self-*properties considered by the different approaches. It is observed that in each approach, researchers focus on one or at most two self-*properties. Based on our analysis, we suggest some of the future directions that can be paved on by researchers working in this domain.