In large-scale, distributed software systems, an important management undertaking concerns the creation and runtime modification of application instances. This short paper proposes an autonomic framework that can produce and maintain coherent and adaptable application instances, in volatile execution environments. In the developed approach, decentralised, contextaware instantiation logic interprets a static architectural model and creates conforming instantiation solutions, customised for the current requirements. A local framework prototype implementing this approach was implemented based on a Service Oriented Component technology. Experimental results based on a Home Monitoring data-mediation scenario show the viability of the proposed solution and of the decentralised framework. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures