Toward an Autonomic Service Management Framework: A Holistic Vision of SOA, AON, and Autonomic Computing

The next-generation network will enable provision of various multimedia applications, with different QoS requirements, over a common IP- based transport infrastructure. However, along with the service consolidation over IP and the rapid increase of network scale, the task of service and network management has become extremely complex and costly. Efforts are being made in various areas, for example, SOA, application-oriented networking, and autonomic computing, to achieve a scalable, secure, and self-managed service delivery framework to shorten the time-to-market of new Internet applications, as well as lower the management costs of service providers. Nevertheless, these technologies are not developed in a coordinated manner for optimal scalability, resource utilization, and QoS performance. In this article, we propose a prototype architecture and discuss related implementation issues for an autonomic service management framework, based on a holistic view of SOA, AON, and autonomic computing. In ASMF, a business or management application with end-to-end QoS requirements can be automatically composed from standard service components in a distributed manner and autonomically managed according to service level agreements.