Scalable Management — Technologies for Management of Large-Scale, Distributed Systems

Modern computing environments, such as enterprise data centers, Grids, and PlanetLab, introduce distributed services to address scalability, locality, and reliability. Web Services (WS), in particular, improve decoupling, decentralization, and autonomicity within distributed systems. Unfortunately, scale and decentralization introduce additional problems in distributed services management, such as deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle maintenance. In this paper, we propose a new approach to management of large scale distributed services, based on three artifacts: scalable publish-subscribe eventing, scalable WS-based deployment, and model-based management. We demonstrate that these techniques improve the manageability of services. In this way we enable service developers to focus on the development of service functionality rather than on management features.