Intelligent agents for high availability systems

High availability (HA) systems are designed to guarantee availability of process and data for more then 99% of their operational time. HA are nowadays present in many contexts, both government and commercial services. In particular, the widespread of IoT smart devices has increased the need of HA systems providing broad network access. Many HA systems are built on top of the cloud, which is the standard de facto for small and medium companies to exploit reliable computational resources capable to scale up and down very quickly. Intelligent agents were developed more than 20 years ago, they have assumed a great importance in various context. Indeed, they are capable, in principle, to perceive the environment where they live and autonomously take actions to achieve goals in a wide range of contexts. Moreover, agents can improve their own performance by adopting machine learning techniques or by gaining knowledge about both environment and application domains. This position paper explores the use of intelligent agents to support core mechanisms—specifically monitoring, failure detection, and recovery—in HA systems. The discussion begins by reviewing key background concepts of HA architectures, followed by a structured characterization of their main components.