Autonomy and interdependence: an intermediate position

ABSTRACT

It is suggested that there are distributed system design choices which, for certain environments, permit machines to retain substantial degrees of autonomy while at the same time support the effect of integrated operation. That is, most of the drawbacks to autonomous designs and global control can be avoided while providing most of the advantages that encourage either choice. This point of view is motivated by experiences with the Locus distributed UNIX operating system and its derivative, IBM's AIX TCF.