This technical paper provides an overview of IBM’s Autonomic Toolkit components and an introduction to my research into the development of autonomic services. The program should assess the effort and complexity involved in developing a simplified autonomic architecture on which a set of disparate services can be deployed and maintained autonomically. The advantages of such an architecture will then be compared against the ease of creating such autonomic environments. My research will show that autonomic computing does result in reduced complexity, increased productivity, graceful deployment and ease of management. However in researching the current state of the art in autonomic computing, I will explore some areas which require extensive further work in order to achieve the goals autonomic computing promises. The two main technologies that will be used to develop this architecture are IBM’s autonomic
toolkit and Knopflerfish’s Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. In this paper I will discuss these technologies and how they can be combined to produce an
autonomic architecture