The Autonomic Cloud

The cloud case study within ASCENS explores the vision of an autonomic cloud, which is a cloud providing a platform-as-a-service computing infrastructure which, contrary to the usual practice, does not consist of a well-maintained set of reliable high-performance computers, but instead is formed by a loose collection of voluntarily provided heterogeneous nodes which are connected in a peer-to-peer manner. Such an infrastructure must deal with network resilience, data redundancy, and failover mechanisms for executing applications. As such, the autonomic cloud thus requires a certain degree of self-awareness, monitoring, and self-adaptation to reach its goals, which has been achieved with the integration of ASCENS methods and techniques.