Preliminary Experience of ARMS

To build a rich-media service grid for automatically managing the life-cycle activities of services, it is entailed to have an automatic resource management system to provide a cost-bounded capacity guarantee illusion to services over distributed heterogeneous resources. In this paper, we describe our preliminary experience in the design and implementation of the ARMS (Automatic Resource Management System), a Web service based resource management system. The emerging web service model with single SOAP-based RPC interface provides a good way for the ARMS to uniformly abstract underlying resources and hide the heterogeneity of resources and services. In the ARMS, all heterogeneous workstations and management functions are abstracted as web services based on an abstraction mechanism, named service agent. The service agent provides a SOAP-based RPC messaging engine for uniforming the service interoperation and web-service publish mechanisms for easing the service deployment. To achieve automatic resource management, a secure, scalable, and self-managing distributed resource container, called DMS, is proposed in order to provide resource capacity guarantee for a rich-media service. An DMS can be customized by service-specific policies and cooperates with the global resource management service (GRMS) to achieve demand-driven management automation. The GRMS is responsible for managing global free resources. In order to protect geographically distributed resources and services in the system, the ARMS has implemented an extensible security service that seamlessly integrates Kerberos-like authentication with a role-based access control model. To achieve enforcement transparency, two secure mechanisms: passport and service guard have been introduced to transparently integrate the authentication and access control functions into the web service model.