Adding High Availability and Autonomic Behavior to Web Services

Rapid acceptance of the Web Services architecturepromises to make it the most widely supported andpopular object-oriented architecture to date. Oneconsequence is that a wave of mission-critical WebServices applications will certainly be deployed incoming years. Yet the reliability options available withinWeb Services are limited in important ways. To use aterm proposed by IBM, Web Services systems need tobecome far more "autonomic," configuring themselves,diagnosing faults, and managing themselves. Highavailability applications need more attention. Moreover,the scenarios in which such issues arise often entail verylarge deployments, raising questions of scalability. In thispaper we propose a path by which the architecture couldbe extended in these respects.