Autonomic Computing is a grand challenge that strives to create self-regulating environments. The end goal, is to create an environment that can self-optimize, self-protect, self-heal and self-configure based on built-in, formulated, and generated logic to address to concerns of the growing complexity in managing computer systems. To do so, Autonomic Computing requires advancement in a plethora of scientific and economical fields. In theory, Autonomic Computing implementations can handle system complexity by abstracting aggregated environment information used in policy bases systems. This allows autonomic elements in the system to administer configuration changes and policy at the moment remediation is needed. In this paper we outline the ideas and direction of Autonomic Computing, the reference architecture we formulated, and the autonomic features we focused our architecture around. The end goal of this research is to aid in the creation of light weight autonomic computing prototype reference architecture, which utilizes SaltStack as an autonomic element. Later, we explain why we thought it was important to utilizes specific open sources tools and academic ideas.
