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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.