Towards generic service management concepts - a service model based approach

Service management has been a hot topic in the research community for the last couple of years. However, due to the complexity of this research area, no commonly accepted definition of the terms service, service management, and the associated management tasks has evolved yet. This paper contributes to the ongoing process of defining these terms by proposing a top–down oriented and systematic methodology that is used to analyze and identify the necessary actors and the corresponding inter – and intra–organizational relationships. Then, a generic service model is introduced that defines commonly needed service– related terms, concepts and structuring rules in a general and unambiguous way. Since most of the work that is being presented here is still in flux, the service model is finally used to identify and structure open research questions

Towards Very Large, Self-Managing Distributed Systems

Introduction As distributed systems tend to grow in the number of components and in their geographical dispersion, deployment and management are increasingly becoming problematic. For long, there has been a tradition of developing architectures for managing networked and distributed systems [2]. These architectures tend to be complex, unwieldy, and indeed, difficult to manage. We need to explore alternative avenues if we want to construct a next generation of distributed systems. Recently, solutions have been sought to develop self-managing systems. The basic idea here, is that a distributed system can continuously monitor its own behavior and take corrective action when needed. As with many new, or newly introduced, concepts, it is often difficult to separate hype from real content. In the case of self-management (or other forms of self- * -ness), the low signal-to-noise ratio can be partly explained by our poor understanding of what self-management actually means