Robustness in Autonomic E-Service Systems

The manner in which e-services are supplied and consumed is changing rapidly with the introduction of service-oriented computing, as a paradigm of distributed computing. The advancements of cloud computing, as a larger scale example, has seen the emergence of networks of collaborating application services widely distributed across enterprise and organizational boundaries. This arises as the nature of service-oriented computing is the provision of e-services that offer autonomous platform independent computational units that are described, published, discovered, organized and managed into large scale networks of services. Interacting services providing a rich e-service variety, across heterogeneous platforms and domains, lay down many new challenges in the autonomic governance of such systems. In this paper the issue of robust (e-) service networks is considered using load-balancing as an autonomic indicator.