Automated Composition of Middleware Management Services

Middleware has been the most popular runtime platform of modern IT systems and widely adopted in a number of major application domains. Middleware not only provides infrastructural services supporting applications, but also plays an important role in system management. Due to the ever-changing user requirements and application contexts along with the diverse usage patterns, only an individual middleware platform cannot work well. It urgently requires the efficient cooperation of a set of distributed and heterogeneous middleware platforms, while the management becomes even complex. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented management approach in which basic functions for middleware management are published as services and composed together for the more complex management tasks. Further, this paper focuses on automatically discovering and assembling management services into management tasks. Our contributions includes defining the management task as a MAPE(monitor-analyze-plan-execute) process which provides rules for the management service composition and enables its automation.