The Vision of Autonomic Computing

A 2001 IBM manifesto observed that a looming software complexity crisis—caused by applications and environments that number into the tens of millions of lines of code—threatened to halt progress in computing. The manifesto noted the almost impossible difficulty of managing current and planned computing systems, which require integrating several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems that extend into the Internet. Autonomic computing, perhaps the most attractive approach to solving this problem, creates systems that can manage themselves when given high-level objectives from administrators.