Autonomic Computing (Redoux)

In the last issue I wrote about how VMware's acquisition of SpringSource gives them a way to interact directly with application developers, and how valuable a framework may turn out to be in Cloud and Utility computing as a way of solving important infrastructure optimization issues (like edge acceleration) without requiring the application developer to understand all the nasty bits. VMware has something even more important in mind I think: what their Analyst Day talks hinted at was that they thought that applications built on the framework could be instrumented and automatically managed as a result. If you remember, IBM tried "Autonomic" computing some time ago, and couldn't really make it work. It seems pretty clear that an executable binary is much too cryptic to make sense of at run time for broader management purposes. Things improve with virtualization because it's much easier to see what the application is doing (if not to understand it). With a framework, things improve still more because you see more of the program structure at the framework abstraction layer, and as VMware notes, you can instrument the framework to give you more useful information about what the program is doing. Are these changes enough to make something like autonomic computing really work? Remember, the goal is a smart data center than automatically dynamically adjusts to accommodate evolving load, hardware and software failure, issues of scaling, ... Our friends at Microsoft would argue I think that this isn't going to work for VMware. Microsoft thinks that by the time you get an executable program all the interesting information about the program (the design intent, how it performs and scales, how you can tell it's in trouble) has been removed or encrypted beyond all hope. Microsoft's approach (Dynamic IT) is based on the idea of capturing and preserving key design and operational data in a declarative form, and using all this in the data center to achieve the goal. Virtualization changes the game enough to make VMware's direction worth looking into, but if you asked me now, I wouldn't bet the rent money they can make it work anymore than IBM could.