Autonomic WWW server management with distributed resources

If many people access a Web server at one time, the server might not be able to respond within an acceptable time or even provide the service. Therefore, enough servers should be assigned to a service to guarantee quality of service. But reserving a lot of resources for peak access is not cost effective, because these resources are idle most of the time. In order to solve this problem, technologies called utility computing or autonomic computing have been proposed and are under development. However, these technologies utilize resources only within one organization. In this paper, we present an autonomic system architecture that uses distributed resources leveraged by Grid technology. In our architecture, computing resources are rented from different organizations. Our architecture supports J2EE systems; hence, existing Web applications can be used without any modification. In addition, our architecture considers the location of the resources when redirecting a request to a server and allocating a new server, thereby leading to better performance. We adopted WS-Agreement as an interface for negotiating service level agreements. We have implemented and evaluated this system and confirmed the effectiveness of this architecture.