Robustness and scalability

Several architectures for autonomic systems have been proposed in the past decade. In this research challenge paper, we briefly discuss them with an emphasize on their robustness and scalability. We propose a two-layer autonomic architecture where the global management functions are carried out by a self-organizing feedback loop inspired by the behavior of ant colonies and expect it to be robust and scalable. The proposed architecture is sustained with examples from our past work as well as our plans for future research.