English

Emergence-as-Code for Self-Governing Reliable Systems

Software Engineering 2026-02-06 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Performance Systems and Control Systems and Control

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.05458,
  title  = {Emergence-as-Code for Self-Governing Reliable Systems},
  author = {Anatoly A. Krasnovsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05458},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:37:31.470Z