Emergence-as-Code for Self-Governing Reliable Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces Emergence-as-Code (EmaC), a framework to make journey reliability in microservices systems computable and governable through declarative specifications, runtime inference, and automated control artifacts.

Contribution

EmaC provides a novel declarative approach to model, infer, and control journey reliability in complex microservice architectures, addressing drift and governance issues.

Findings

EmaC enables explicit modeling of journey reliability objectives.

The system synthesizes journey models from operational telemetry.

Automated control artifacts support reliable system governance.

Abstract

SLO-as-code has made per-service} reliability declarative, but user experience is defined by journeys whose reliability is an emergent property of microservice topology, routing, redundancy, timeouts/fallbacks, shared failure domains, and tail amplification. As a result, journey objectives (e.g., "checkout p99 < 400 ms") are often maintained outside code and drift as the system evolves, forcing teams to either miss user expectations or over-provision and gate releases with ad-hoc heuristics. We propose Emergence-as-Code (EmaC), a vision for making journey reliability computable and governable via intent plus evidence. An EmaC spec declares journey intent (objective, control-flow operators, allowed actions) and binds it to atomic SLOs and telemetry. A runtime inference component consumes operational artifacts (e.g., tracing and traffic configuration) to synthesize a candidate journey model with provenance and confidence. From the last accepted model, the EmaC compiler/controller derives bounded journey SLOs and budgets under explicit correlation assumptions (optimistic independence vs. pessimistic shared fate), and emits control-plane artifacts (burn-rate alerts, rollout gates, action guards) that are reviewable in a Git workflow. An anonymized artifact repository provides a runnable example specification and generated outputs.