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Autonomic computing - that is, the development of software and hardware systems featuring a certain degree of self-awareness and self-adaptability - is a field with many application areas and many technical difficulties. In this paper, we explore the idea of an autonomic cloud in the form of a platform-as-a-service computing infrastructure which, contrary to the usual practice, does not consist of a well-maintained set of reliable high-performance computers, but instead is formed by a loose collection of voluntarily provided heterogeneous nodes which are connected in a peer-to-peer manner. Such an infrastructure must deal with network resilience, data redundancy, and failover mechanisms for executing applications. We discuss possible solutions and methods which help developing such (and similar) systems. The described approaches are developed in the EU project ASCENS

The cloud case study within ASCENS explores the vision of an autonomic cloud, which is a cloud providing a platform-as-a-service computing infrastructure which, contrary to the usual practice, does not consist of a well-maintained set of reliable high-performance computers, but instead is formed by a loose collection of voluntarily provided heterogeneous nodes which are connected in a peer-to-peer manner. Such an infrastructure must deal with network resilience, data redundancy, and failover mechanisms for executing applications. As such, the autonomic cloud thus requires a certain degree of self-awareness, monitoring, and self-adaptation to reach its goals, which has been achieved with the integration of ASCENS methods and techniques

With the days of the lone coder long gone, it is critical in our education of young computer scientists to lay particular emphasis on the "softer" spots of software development: How to organize a development process, how to deal with teams of software engineers with different skills and motivations, and how to produce outstanding software despite hard deadlines and (ideally) a 40-hour-week. In this paper, we report on the setup, execution, and results of two software development labs with a specific focus on agile methodologies conducted in 2010 and 2011 at our university. Not only are agile methods widespread in practice today; with their focus on human interaction and worklife balance, we believe that experiencing a full agile product development cycle in the risk-free academic environment is a benefit not only for our students' technical skills, but to their social skills as well.

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