The complexity of modern computer networks and systems, combined with the extremely dynamic environments in which they operate, is beginning to outpace our ability to manage them. Taking yet another page from the biomimetics playbook, the autonomic computing paradigm mimics the human autonomic nervous system to free system developers and administrators from performing and overseeing low-level tasks. Surveying the current path toward this paradigm, Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications offers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research and implementations in this emerging area. This book begins by introducing the concepts and requirements of autonomic computing and exploring the architectures required to implement such a system. The focus then shifts to the approaches and infrastructures, including control-based and recipe-based concepts, followed by enabling systems, technologies, and services proposed for achieving a set of "self-*" properties, including self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection. In the final section, examples of real-world implementations reflect the potential of emerging autonomic systems, such as dynamic server allocation and runtime reconfiguration and repair. Collecting cutting-edge work and perspectives from leading experts, Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications reveals the progress made and outlines the future challenges still facing this exciting and dynamic field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 14th International Middleware Conference, held in Beijing, China, in December 2013. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of middleware for next-generation platforms such as cloud computing, social networks and large-scale storage and distributed systems. The middleware solutions introduced provide features such as availability, efficiency, scalability, fault-tolerance, trustworthy operation and support security and privacy needs.