Web Services and IT Management

Pankaj Kumar, ACM Queue

Platform and programming language independence, coupled with industry momentum, has made Web services the technology of choice for most enterprise integration projects. Their close relationship with SOA (service-oriented architecture) has also helped them gain mindshare.
The real power of SOA and Web services becomes apparent when various constituents are added, removed, replaced, or upgraded without adversely impacting the whole system. This is just not possible when each part of the architecture relies on intimate knowledge of the inner workings of every other part and shares code, in the form of language-specific libraries, for processing messages. Although the basic standards referred to earlier are adequate for a variety of SOA solutions, IT management has some special needs that these standards do not meet:
(1) The Web service representing an IT resource should be able to send alerts or notifications to those managers that have expressed interest.
(2) It should be possible for a manager to retrieve the state of the underlying IT resource, represented by a collection of named and typed properties, from the corresponding Web service in an efficient manner.
(3) Real IT resources are commissioned and decommissioned on a need basis; hence, their Web service representations also have to be ephemeral. These aspects became clear during discussions by the WSDM-TC (Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee), an OASIS group chartered to create specifications for management using Web services and management of Web services.

http://tinyurl.com/cfx92
See also OASIS WSDM TC: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsdm/