Customizable Service State Durability for Service Oriented Architectures

Many techniques are known for improving service dependability in service oriented architectures, but each technique has its tradeoffs relative to runtime performance overhead, resource cost, and level of assurance provided. The ability to choose the particular techniques used based on the service requirements and characteristics allows the optimization of these tradeoffs. This paper proposes making durability a customizable attribute of service states, and describes a proof of concept implementation for Web services that allows different durability mechanisms (e.g., in-memory replication or database storage) to be implemented as separate modules and then applied as needed to different variables and data structures constituting the service state. Preliminary performance results are presented using a prototype implementation of a highly available matchmaker service