Autonomic Network Management, Some Pragmatic Considerations

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Autonomic Network Management, Some Pragmatic
Considerations

• Richard Mortier, MSR Cambridge
• Emre Kiciman, MSR Redmond

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Autonomic network management

• Automatic techniques to increase reliability and
  performance while reducing cost
• A very wide range of techniques exists
• Simplistic control loops
• Explicit modelling
• Gossip/swarming/biological paradigms
• Some work well, some still experimental

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Roadmap

• A position paper
• Some thoughts on successful applications based on
  a few historical examples
• I will outline our position, leaving detailed
  examples to paper
• Disclaimer
• Neither of us are autonomic gurus
• Neither of us do control theory

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Three modest proposals

• In paper, with reference to examples
• Beware interacting control loops
• Be explicit (in goals and assumptions)
• Help people help the system
• Clearly many other useful guidelines exist
• Question where are they written down?

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Beware interacting control loops

• I am not a control theory person, but
• interacting control loops are complex ?
• Avoid uncontrolled/accidental interactions
• Designed interactions can be very welcome
• c.f. Session 1, Session 2

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Be explicit

• Making assumptions and goals explicit is just
  good system design practice
• If you dont know what its supposed to do, and
  when, how can you know what it will do?
• Automatic determination and handling of failure
• Can we minimize intervention by self-testing?
• Design for maintenance, upgrade, extension
• No large system is truly static
• c.f. Session 1, 2

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Help people help the system

• Operator intervention is normal behavior
• Blind intervention is highly disruptive
• Even partially sighted intervention unhelpful
• Design for measurement
• Even in a perfect system, operators will want to
  know its perfect!
• c.f. Session 3

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Concluding thoughts

• We proposed some guidelines for ANM
• From examining historically successful systems
• Prerequisites for modelling, composability
• Yes they may seem obvious, but
• None of them address another very tricky area
• inter-foo problems economics, regulations,
  policy conflicts
• Questions
• Can we build even a single self-managing
  computer?
• Is this any simpler than a self-managing network?
• Is it a requirement for a self-managing network?
• When should we stop?
• Who are we building the self-managing network for?