Service migration in autonomic service oriented grids

The introduction of Web services into grids helped to address their two main obstacles to be embraced by business and industry, heterogeneity and useability. However, many problems are still open, e.g., grid reconfiguration, reliability and computing optimization. We argue here that a mechanism that could help solving these problems is Web Service migration, a part of automatic and transparent brokerage. Web service migration presents a number of new requirements not addressed in traditional process migration, being the outcome of Web services specific configuration of hosts and application servers, and availability of Web services / resources state. In this paper we report on our study into the development of a Web service migration facility focused on providing migration of services in a Service Oriented Grid environment. We present a novel approach to Web service migration, embodied in a System Management Broker, which is transparent, interoperable and flexible. We take the requirements of Web services into consideration when discovering suitable destination hosts and match services to suitable grid resources which are able to fulfil the needs of the service. We discuss a number of experiments conducted with different types of grid and Web service applications to highlight the feasibility and effectiveness of our migration facility and demonstrate how our facility significantly improves Service Oriented Grids.