Web Services service level management: overview of service level agreement languages, support infrastructures and tools

Engineering extended service-oriented architecture (SOA) –based web services for open environments that support collaboration sets numerous requirements to web services languages and support infrastructure capabilities provided by vendors. Issues such as composition and management of services become important, yet neither web services or the vendor platform support infrastructure contain the all required capabilities, let alone are mature enough in certain areas to even think about production use. This paper focuses on management and in service-level management in particular, comparing approaches in web services languages, support infrastructures and tools to investigate the differences and commonalities in current research initiatives. In order to understand the vast differences in approaches, a comprehensive overview of the background relating to the concept of quality of service is also provided.