Deploying Fault Tolerant Web Service Compositions

Authors

Abstract

Many businesses are now moving towards the use of composite web services. These consist of a collection of web services working together to achieve an objective. Although they are becoming business-critical elements, current development tools do not provide a practical way to include fault tolerance characteristics in web services compositions. This paper proposes a mechanism that allows programmers to easily develop fault tolerant compositions using diverse services. The mechanism allows programmers to specify alternative web services for each operation and offers a set of artifacts that simplify the coding process, by automatically dealing with all aspects related to the redundant web services invocation and responses voting. The mechanism is also able to perform a continuous evaluation of the services based on their behavior during operation. The approach is illustrated using compositions based on services publicly available in the Internet and on the services specified by the standard TPC-App performance benchmark.

Keywords

web services, fault tolerance, diversity

Subject

Web Services Fault Tolerance

Journal

International Journal of Computer Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), Special Issue on Engineering Fault Tolerant Systems (EFTS), Vol. 23, #5, CRL Publishing, September 2008