Failure Semantics in a SOA Environment

In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), services publish descriptions to permit their composition into larger services. There are however serious gaps in the semantics of such service descriptions and these hinder the adoption of SOAs in mission-critical applications. This paper identifies some of these lacunae and proposes a foundation for resolving one of them - service failure. The technique of crash-only failure is proposed as a useful first step and we illustrate how it is particularly applicable to web services in a SOA.