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Challenges of Self-Managing Systems: a System
Administrator’s PerspectiveDr. Alva L. Couch, Associate Professor
of Computer Science, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA
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Sysadmins and self-managing systems
• Self-managing systems: built from bottom up, system-centric– How to make systems more robust
• System administration: built from the top down, administrator (people) centric– How to empower people to do their jobs
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Sysadmin Challenges for Self-managing Systems
• Personal liability: it is not the self-healing system that can lose its job
• Semantic distance and the problem of common referents: system administrators do not understand what self-healing systems do
• Expense of policy changes: small changes can incur large (political) costs
• Interference with auditing: can’t both “fix it” and “analyze it”
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Desirable Forms of Self-Management
• Strong closures: “keep the box closed!”– “Half-open” is worse than “open”– We don’t want to debug “your” code (or
“tweak your knobs”!)
• Guarantees: “what can we expect?”– SLA for administrators– Controls concentrate on SLA parameters:
optimization/intrusiveness tradeoffs
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“Like Hardware”
• No need to build system
• Automatic baselining and upgrades
• Directly modify only configuration
• Configuration concentrates on SLA
• Replacement if fails
• Remote diagnosis
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Low-Hanging Fruit
• Closed, optimized network services– File sharing– Web services
• Don’t forget management aids – Distributed
• backup and recovery• email and spam control• firewalling and virus control
– Tiered (local/remote) filesystems– User authentication and authorization
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The Near Future
• Commoditization of services: file service becomes like routing; a reliable closed box. Already almost true.
• Gradual commoditization of higher-level “policy-free” services, e.g., user privilege management.
• System administrator’s job becomes component engineering.
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What Won’t Happen
• Peer-peer adoption without strong convergence and fault-tolerance guarantees (peer-peer is a “problem”, not a “solution”)
• Commoditization of administrator interface and business policies: “variant taxonomies of policy”
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Standards
• Existing standards– Will aid developers; should not concern administrators– About how a tool should interact, not about how an administrator
should interact
• Standards that have helped sysadmins: – pop, imap, smtp, … – Sysadmin controls service; user controls choice of client/GUI
• Some potentially helpful standards– Semantics of SLA parameters for component solutions– Base (“policy-free?”) semantics for user bindings including
authentication and authorization.
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Conclusions
• Build self-managing components.
• Provide an interface with strong semantics.
• Let sysadmins do the rest: – User interface– Translation from business policy to system
policy.