Service domains

• Published in: IBM systems journal Vol. 43; no. 4; pp. 734 - 755
• Main Authors: Tan, Y.-S., Vellanki, V., Xing, J., Topol, B., Dudley, G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Armonk International Business Machines Corporation 01.01.2004
• Subjects: Customer services; Distributed processing; Interfaces; Internet service providers; Inventory control; Knowledge management; Logic; Network topologies; Portfolio management; Quality of service; Software; Studies; Web services; United States > US
• ISSN: 0018-8670
• DOI: 10.1147/sj.434.0734

In this paper we introduce the concept of service domain, to be used as a major building block for implementing service-oriented architectures in large computing grids in which tens or hundreds of services are offered to customers. A service domain maps a collection of comparable or related services to a single logical service. We describe an architecture for service domains that uses a set of policy rules for managing the collection of services and that automatically dispatches the "best" service available to satisfy user requests. The architecture has built-in autonomie properties in that a service domain implementation monitors the events within its control and triggers adjustment actions in its member services, including recovery from service failure and handling of topology changes. We describe a reference implementation of the service domain architecture that is publicly available as a development toolkit, and we discuss its application in the implementation of a large grid now in progress. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]