Cloud systems are the backbone of today's computing industry. Yet, these systems remain complicated to design, build, operate, and improve. All these tasks require significant manual effort by both developers and operators of these systems. To reduce this manual burden, in this paper we set forth a vision for achieving holistic automation, intent-based system design and operation. We propose intent as a new abstraction within the context of system design and operation. Intent encodes the functional and operational requirements of the system at a high-level, which can be used to automate design, implementation, operation, and evolution of systems. We detail our vision of intent-based system design, highlight its four key components, and provide a roadmap for the community to enable autonomous systems.
@article{arxiv.2502.05984,
title = {Intent-based System Design and Operation},
author = {Vaastav Anand and Yichen Li and Alok Gautam Kumbhare and Celine Irvene and Chetan Bansal and Gagan Somashekar and Jonathan Mace and Pedro Las-Casas and Rodrigo Fonseca},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05984},
year = {2025}
}