Management of Efficient Service Provision in Distributed Systems

The increase in service provision over the internet as well as the trend to establish global open service markets supply a basis for business scenarios in which e-commerce applications become more and more important. To survive in the arising competition situation between different service providers, services have to be offered not only in a wide range and for a suitable price, but additionally they have to be deployed in an efficient way, promising a good quality and performance in service provision to satisfy the customers. Because existing internet infrastructures have to be integrated and used in service provision, it becomes necessary for service providers to develop new concepts for the management of the arising service-oriented distributed systems. This paper discusses mechanisms for the management of such services in distributed environments. A trader is used as a central component, supporting a customer in choosing a service and a provider in delivering this service efficiently. For this purpose, the trader is enhanced to consider as well quality aspects of a requested service, as the global state of the distributed system when selecting a service. To fulfil performance characteristics of a mediated service at usage time without the necessity to involve application developers and users, a load balancer and management proxies are integrated into the trader for a proactive management of the service usage process.