1. A distributed computing system comprising: a plurality of application nodes interconnected via a communications network; and a control node comprising: an automation subsystem having one or more rule engines that provide autonomic control of the deployment, undeployment, start of execution, and termination of execution of a set of applications to the application nodes in accordance with a set of one or more rules; and an application governor that performs actions with respect to the applications in response to action requests from the rules engine.