Sustaining Web Services High-Availability Using Communities

This paper discusses how communities of Web services sustain the high availability of Web services engaged in composition scenarios. Availability is the proportion of time that a system is in a functioning condition. Web services offering the same functionality like HotelBooking are gathered into a single community regardless of who developed them, where they are located, and how they function. The current practice to achieve Web services high-availability advocates the use of replicas, which are managed according to specific replication strategies and come into play when the original Web service to back-up fails. Replacing Web services replicas with similarly functional Web services offers solutions to some of the limitations that feature these strategies, but at the same time raises other issues that are examined in this paper.