Towards Unified Service Hosting

Service-oriented computing is increasingly assuming an important role in the research on distributed systems and software engineering. It has also reached application and service hosters by now who need to be able to host off-the-shelf services as well as custom services. Thus, they are faced with a variety of service descriptions, service package formats and runtime demands. Each service technology usually requires a separate execution platform which eventually leads to a high complexity for the administration and management of services. Similar to the unification of invocation of web services through protocol adapters, it is clearly needed to unify management aspects like monitoring and adaptation of services. We therefore propose an abstraction, a formalisation and a unification layer for hosting environments with the intent to pave the wayion, a formalisation and a unification layer for hosting environments with the intent to pave the way for technology-agnostic, unified service hosting.