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'''The Vision of Autonomic computing''' 
 
'''Autonomic computing''' —> computing systems that can ''manage themselves given high-level objectives'' from administrators 
 
'''Self-management''' 
The essence of autonomic computing systems is self-management, the intent of which is to ''free system administrators from the details of system operation and maintenance and to provide users with a machine that runs at peak performance 24/7'' 
 
'''Self-configuration ''' 
Installing, configuring, and integrating large, complex systems is challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone even for experts. 
''Autonomic systems will configure themselves automatically'' in accordance with high-level policies — representing business-level objectives 
 
'''Self-optimization''' 
Autonomic systems will ''continually seek ways to improve their operation'', identifying and seizing opportunities to make themselves more efficient in performance or cost. 
 
'''Self-healing''' 
Autonomic computing systems will detect, diagnose, and repair localized problems resulting from bugs or failures in software and hardware, perhaps through a regression tester. 
 
'''Self-protection''' 
Despite the existence of firewalls and intrusion detection tools, humans must at present decide how to protect systems from malicious attacks and inadvertent cascading failures. Autonomic systems will be self-protecting in two senses. ''They will defend the system as a whole against large-scale, correlated problems arising from malicious attacks'' or cascading failures that remain uncorrected by self-healing measures. They also will anticipate problems based on early reports from sensors and take steps to avoid or mitigate them. 
 
'''Architectural Considerations''' 
Autonomic systems will be interactive collections of autonomic elements—individual system constituents that contain resources and deliver services to humans and other autonomic elements. Autonomic elements will manage their internal behavior and their relationships with other autonomic elements in accordance with policies that humans or other elements have established. 
 
An ''autonomic element will typically consist of one or more managed elements coupled with a single autonomic manager that controls and represents them.'' The managed element will essentially be equivalent to what is found in ordinary nonautonomic systems, although it can be adapted to enable the autonomic manager to monitor and control it. The managed element could be a hardware resource, such as storage, a CPU, or a printer, or a software resource, such as a database, a directory service, or a large legacy system. 
 
'''Design, test, and verification''' 
Programming an autonomic element will mean extending Web services or grid services with programming tools and techniques that aid in managing relationships with other autonomic elements 
 
Applying monitoring, audit, and verification tests at all the needed points ''without burdening systems with excessive bandwidth or processing demands will be a challenge''. Technologies to allow statistical or sample-based testing in a dynamic environment may prove helpful.

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