Autonomic Management Framework for Cloud-Native Applications

In order to meet the rapidly changing requirements of the Cloud-native dynamic execution environment, without human support and without the need to continually improve one's skills, autonomic features need to be added. Embracing automation at every layer of performance management enables us to reduce costs while improving outcomes. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of autonomic management requirements of Cloud-native applications. We propose that the automation is achieved via high-level policies. In turn autonomy features are accomplished via the rule engine support. First, the paper presents the engineering perspective of building a framework for Autonomic Management of Cloud-Native Applications, namely AMoCNA, in accordance with Model Driven Architecture (MDA) concepts. AMoCNA has many desirable features whose main goal is to reduce the complexity of managing Cloud-native applications. The presented models are, in fact, meta-models, being technology agnostic. Secondly, the paper demonstrates one possibility of implementing the aforementioned design procedures. The presented AMoCNA implementation is also evaluated to identify the potential overhead introduced by the framework.