Adding high availability and autonomic behavior to Web services

Rapid acceptance of the Web Services architecture promises to make it the most widely supported and popular object-oriented architecture to date. One consequence is that a wave of mission-critical Web Services applications will certainly be deployed in coming years. Yet the reliability options available within Web Services are limited in important ways. To use a term proposed by IBM, Web Services systems need to become far more autonomic, configuring themselves, diagnosing faults, and managing themselves. High availability applications need more attention. Moreover, the scenarios in which such issues arise often entail very large deployments, raising questions of scalability. In this paper we propose a path by which the architecture could be extended in these respects.