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Web services management
Imagine that you've just built your first Web services. You struggled with understanding your internal business processes and figuring out how best to expose them to your business partners; you sweated over how to integrate your work with external suppliers; and you did the grunt work of building the Web services themselves, complaining all the while about the vagaries of XML, SOAP and UDDI. Finally, your Web service is launched, up and running.
Think the hard work is over? Think again. It's just begun.
Businesses are just coming to realize that building Web services is difficult enough – but managing them after they're launched is where the real work begins, and a key to making sure that businesses reap all the benefits of the technology. To accomplish that, a new type of software has been developed: Web services management tools. The term is somewhat vague, and to a certain extent means different things to different people, but it covers vital things such as making sure that Web services are tied properly to business processes; understanding how the Web services will fit into an overall system architecture before launch; managing the roll-out process; managing and troubleshooting Web services once they're launched; managing XML objects; building Web services into service level agreements; and ensuring Quality of Service (QOS); among other features.
Why management tools are needed
Web services have unique properties that make them particularly difficult to manage, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with the consulting group ZapThink, which specializes in Web services.
"They're different from other applications in that one of their advantages is that they're loosely coupled and dynamically bound, and really are only an interface between applications. So when you say you need to manage them, you're talking about managing an interface."
Making management even more difficult, he says, is that if the Web service provides links to an external service, you don't have any control over that external service, and "how can you manage something over which you have no control? And how can you test it without putting it into production?"
This means, he says, "that you have to manage them while they're running, and do management on the fly."
Where the vendors are
ZapThink is in the process of finishing a report about Web services management tools, and in it, the consulting group differentiates between two different types of tools: Those that manage the development and deployment process; and those that manage Web services that are already in production. Among vendors that sell products for managing the development and deployment process are Infravio and Cape Clear, Schmelzer notes, while among those that sell tools for Web services already in production include Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard (Open View).
Those vendors are only a few of the many that are rushing to market, Schmelzer says, and he believes that "after security, this will be the major growth market."
His views are echoed by Ted Schadler, Group Director of Research for the consulting firm Forrester Research, which is also putting together a report on Web services management tools. He says that there are a "slew of startups" involved with managing Web services. "They're all over the place on what they do, but they solve the same basic problem: making sure that SOAP traffic is audited, secured, encrypted, reported on, and managed."
Companies including AmberPoint, Corporate Oxygen, WestGlobal, Digital Evolution, Blue Titan Software, and Talking Blocks make software for securing, auditing and managing Web services, he says. He believes that eventually, management tools for doing repetitive tasks such as doing xml transformations can be "put right into silicon" and so be embedded in network appliances and other hardware. Companies that already do this include DataPower Technology and Sarvega, he adds.
In the long run, Schadler believes that most startups involved with the technology will be eventually bought out by larger firms, or the technology will migrate into application servers. Because of that, he expects that the largest companies, such as IBM, BEA, Microsoft and Oracle will become the dominant vendors in the field.
How standards can help
There is enough of a need for management tools that the standards-setting body OASIS recently formed a committee to develop the Web Services Management Protocol which will govern, among other things, how Web services can be managed internally as well as with external partners. The committee charged with establishing the standard, the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, is looking at XML, SOAP, the Open Model Interface (OMI), and the Distributed Management Task Force's Common Information Model (CIM) as the underlying basis for the new standard.
Winston Bumpus, chair of the committee and Director of Standards at Novell, notes up until now "management has been done through proprietary technology…it has let you manage individual components, but not let you manage the entire system in a holistic way." The new standard will allow for platform independence, "and allow companies to manage systems regardless of the platform they use."
The goal, he says, is to have a draft of the standard completed by June, 2003. It will most likely include standards for features such as performance models and QOS among others.
What the future holds
Most people involved with Web services management believe that the development of these tools is vital to the long-range financial success of Web services. In particular, ZapThink's Schmelzer says that tools are needed to monitor and manage metering, billing and QOS – without that, there will be no financial underpinning to Web services, and no way to ensure quality. He believes, in fact, that the tools will be as important to the widespread acceptance of Web services as search sites were to the acceptance of the Web.
"Search sites are what made the Web usable, because after the earliest days, it became impossible to keep track of everything that was available," he says. "The same thing will happen to Web services. The more Web services you have in an organization, the more it can become an unmanageable mess. In a few years there might be thousands of Web services in an organization and you'll need a tool to locate and manage them all."
Editor's Note: In part 2 of this two-part series, we'll look at how businesses can determine when they need Web service management tools – and how to go about choosing the right vendor.
Continues in Part Two
About the Author
Preston Gralla, a well-known technology expert, is the author of more than 20 books, including "How the Internet Works," which has been translated into 14 languages and sold several hundred thousand copies worldwide. He is an expert on Web services and the author of a major research and white paper for the Software and Information Industry Association on the topic. Gralla was the founding managing editor of PC Week, a founding editor and then editor and editorial director of PC/Computing, and an executive editor for ZDNet and CNet. He has written about technology for more than 15 years for many major magazines and newspapers, including PC Magazine, Computerworld, CIO Magazine, eWeek and its forerunner PC Week, PC/Computing, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Dallas Morning News among others. As a well-known technology guru, he appears frequently on TV and radio shows and networks, including CNN, MSNBC, ABC World News Now, the CBS Early Show, PBS's All Things Considered and others. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including from the Computer Press Association for the Best Feature in a Computer Publication. He can be reached at preston@gralla.com.
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