WS-Re2Policy: A Policy Language for Distributed SLA Monitoring and Enforcement

Web service technology and the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm have become state of the art for the integration of systems across enterprise boundaries. Here, a strong need for policies exists, which describe the Quality of Service delivered by third parties.Current policy languages in the area of Web services and SOAs allow the specification of requirements with respect to the Quality of Service as well as the parameters, which should be monitored. They do not cover the countermeasures needed and accepted in case of requirement violations. Especially, in distributed scenarios it is helpful to provide the monitoring units with information about possible reactions to violations in order to enforce policies at the monitoring units. Therefore, we developed the Web service requirements and reactions policy language (WS-Re2Policy), which overcomes those issues by specifying requirements and reactions in a single policy to be distributed to independent monitoring units.