Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments. 

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AI for Next Generation Computing: Emerging Trends and Future Directions

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) allow defining expected performance of cloud services, such that cloud service providers know what they guarantee and service consumers know what to expect. Most approaches focus on low-level SLOs, closely related to resources, e.g., average CPU or memory usage, and are usually bound to specific elasticity controllers. We present SLO Script, a language and accompanying framework, motivated by real-world, industrial needs to allow service providers to define complex, high-level SLOs in an orchestrator-independent manner. The main features of SLO Script include: i) novel abstractions (StronglyTypedSLO) with type safety features, ensuring compatibility between SLOs and elasticity strategies, ii) abstractions that enable decoupling of SLOs from elasticity strategies, iii) a strongly typed metrics API, and iv) an orchestrator-independent object model that enables language extensibility. We present a case study about a real-world, cloud-native application and evaluate our language while implementing a realistic Cost Efficiency SLO.

SLO Script: A Novel Language for Implementing Complex Cloud-Native Elasticity-Driven SLOs

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) guide the elasticity of cloud applications, e.g., by deciding when and how much the resources provisioned to an application should be changed. Evaluating SLOs requires metrics, which can be directly measured on the application or system, or, more elaborately, be composed from multiple low-level metrics. The implementation of such metrics and SLOs, the triggering of elasticity strategies, and allowing configurability by the user deploying an application, requires a flexible middleware. In this paper, we present a middleware that provides an orchestrator-independent SLO controller for periodically evaluating SLOs and triggering elasticity strategies, while decoupling SLOs from the elasticity strategies to increase flexibility, and provider-independent services for obtaining low-level metrics and composing them into higher-level metrics. We evaluate our middleware by implementing a motivating use case, featuring a cost efficiency SLO for an application deployed on Kubernetes.

A Novel Middleware for Efficiently Implementing Complex Cloud-Native SLOs

Application workload scheduling in hybrid Cloud-Edge-IoT infrastructures has been extensively researched over the last years. The recent trend of containerizing application workloads, both in the cloud and on the edge, has further fueled the need for more advanced scheduling solutions in these hybrid infrastructures. Unfortunately, most of the current approaches are not fully sensitive to the edge properties and also lack adequate support for Service Level Objective (SLO) awareness. Previously, we introduced software defined gateways (SDGs), which enable managing novel edge resources at scale. At the same time Kubernetes was initially released. In spite of not being specifically developed for the edge, Kubernetes implements many of the design principles introduced by our SDGs, making it suitable for building SDG extensions on top of it. In this paper we present Polaris Scheduler - a novel scheduling framework, which enables edge sensitive and SLO aware scheduling in the Cloud-Edge-IoT Continuum. Polaris Scheduler is being developed as a part of Linux Foundation's Centaurus project. We discuss the main research challenges, the approach, and the vision of SLO aware edge sensitive scheduling.

Polaris Scheduler: Edge Sensitive and SLO Aware Workload Scheduling in Cloud-Edge-IoT Clusters

In this panel contribution, I will discuss my vision on the need of developing new managing technologies to harness distributed ``computing continuum'' systems. These systems are concurrently executed in multiple computing tiers: Cloud, Fog, Edge and IoT. This simple idea develops manifold challenges due to the inherent complexity inherited from the underlying infrastructures of these systems. This makes inappropriate the use of current methodologies for managing Internet distributed systems, which are based on the early systems that were based on client/server architectures and were completely specified by the application software.

Distributed Computing Continuum Systems

Since the emergence of cloud computing service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs) have put themselves forward as one of the key enablers for cloud's on-demand, pay-as-you-go service consumption model. To date, the vast majority of cloud platforms provide support for SLAs only in terms of statically predefined SLOs, e.g., service availability, and low-level resource capacity guarantees, e.g., CPU usage. Unfortunately, there is only limited support to clearly map workload performance requirements to the resource capacity guarantees. In this article, we introduce SLOC— a novel elasticity framework, which promotes a novel performance-driven, SLO-native approach to cloud computing. We outline the main research challenges, vision, and approach of our SLOC framework toward the SLO-native paradigm in next generation cloud computing.

Deepak Vij

Papers

SLO Script: A Novel Language for Implementing Complex Cloud-Native Elasticity-Driven SLOs

A Novel Middleware for Efficiently Implementing Complex Cloud-Native SLOs

SLOC: Service Level Objectives for Next Generation Cloud Computing