Self-adapting Applications Based on QA Requirements in the Cloud Using Market-Based Heuristics

There are several situations where applications in the cloud need to self-manage their quality attributes (QA). We posit that self-adaptation can be achieved through a market-based approach and describe a marketplace for web-services. We simulate agents trading web-services on behalf of self-managing applications and demonstrate that such a mechanism leads to a good allocation of web-services to applications, even when applications dynamically change their QA requirements. We conclude with a discussion on evaluating this mechanism of self-adaptation, with regards to scalability in the cloud.