A middleware platform supporting electronic service markets
Dirk Thißen · RWTH Publications (RWTH Aachen) · 2004
The Internet today can be seen as a global market for electronic services. Each provider can offer its services, and customers can choose between several providers offering similar services. A competition between providers arises, in which services have to be offered for a reasonable price, but also have to be deployed in an efficient way, i.e. a service quality determined by performance and availability characteristics must be guaranteed to satisfy the customers. Satisfying the service quality is a critical factor in success of a provider, but not well supported by current infrastructure: the quality of an offered service is determined by application, system, and network characteristics all at once. This paper discusses a management platform supporting the lifecycle of an electronic service from three different views: customer, provider, and infrastructure. A service trader is used as a central component, supporting a customer in choosing a suitable service while considering the global state of the distributed system's resources using load balancing. Management proxies encapsulate services of service groups and observe performance and availability characteristics of the resources involved in a service usage process to fulfill quality demands of a mediated service. The paper mainly focuses on the proxy concept.