Closing the Loop: Building Self-Adaptive Software for Continuous Performance Engineering

Cloud computing and cloud-native platforms have rendered runtime environments more malleable. Simultaneously, the growing demand for flexible and agile software applications and services has driven the emergence of self-adaptive architectures. These architectures, in turn, facilitate software performance modeling, tuning, optimization, and scaling in a continuous manner, blurring the boundary between development-time and run-time. Self-adaptive software employs feedback loop controllers inspired by control theory or variations of the Monitoring-Analysis-Planning-Acting (MAPE) architecture. Whether implemented in a centralized or decentralized manner, most controllers utilize performance models that are learned or tuned at run-time. This shift implies that software is designed to be observable and controllable during execution, presupposing the co-design of software applications and their runtime controllers.