In the modern era of technology, many software systems are legacy software systems that have become too expensive to replace and too costly to re-engineer. Considering the need of improving the business values of such systems is the need to do so in the simplest, cost-effective, and least risky way available. There are a number of approaches used by software engineers to mitigate legacy systems by inserting new computing techniques. A relatively recent technique in software engineering concentrate on implementing self-managing attributes, like autonomic behavior in such legacy software and systems of applications in order to avoid the need for human monitoring and intervention. In this paper survey of different techniques and frameworks for building autonomous system have been presented. These techniques considerably reduces the cost of maintaining legacy systems.