On the Need for Dependability Research on Service Oriented Systems∗

Web services (WS) — the most prominent technology for realizing service oriented architectures — are broadly pushed by vendors and are likely to be deployed in dependability demanding areas such as air traffic control, health care, or transportation in the near future. However, although a plethora of WS standards exists, only few of them address dependability, namely specifications for transactions and reliable messaging. In addition, some research (but not standardization) efforts have been spent on other dependability techniques such as replication. However, most of this work is only appropriate in homogeneous settings but is insufficient for systems of the future characterized by massive scale and heterogeneity. Thus, in this paper we shortly discuss existing WS dependability standards and identify missing dependability specifications. Our aim is to encourage the DSN community to focus some of their research efforts on dependability of service oriented systems.