Today, software development teams are facing the challenge of growing hardware and software platforms, this compounding with tremendous increase of applications complexity. Hardware complexity expands with many-core processor architectures, integrated communications and management. Information systems complexity increases as organizations move to Service-Oriented Architectures running on grids that may include thousands of geographically distributed systems dependent upon multi-site collaboration, and fast, reliable access to shared resources and data. In order to overcome the increasing complexity of IT infrastructure and associated workload to maintain such a complex infrastructure, we need self-adaptive and autonomic computing systems.

AC is an emerging field for developing large-scale, self-managing, complex distributed systems. The vision and metaphor of AC is to apply the principles of self-regulation and complexity hiding to the design of complex computer-based systems.