2.7 - What Can Web Services Bring to Integrated Management?

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the main standards pertaining to Web services and presents different ways of using this middleware technology in integrated management. Since the turn of the millennium, Web services have pervaded the middleware industry, despite their technical limitations, their ongoing standardization, the resulting lack of stable standards, the different meanings of the term service to different people, and the fact that marketing forces have blurred the technical reality that hides behind this term. As a major technology on the software market, Web services deserve to be investigated from an integrated management perspective. Unfortunately, it does not comply with SOA, the distributed computing architectural style that underpins Web services. Coarse-grained Web services, conversely, are SOA compliant and work at a higher level of abstraction. Each Web service corresponds to a high-level management task (e.g., balancing the load of a virtual resource across multiple physical resources) or a macrocomponent of a management application (e.g., an event correlator). Coarse-grained Web services are autonomous (each of them fulfills some functionality on its own), loosely coupled with the rest of the management application, and coarse-grained. From a business standpoint, adopting Web services makes sense because the software industry is massively adopting this technology, so there are many tools available and many experts in the field. From an engineering standpoint, Web services make it possible to organize management applications differently. This is appealing for architecting integrated management applications aimed at large organizations.