Flexible service provision considering specific customer resource needs

The development of global networks like the Internet has opened new possibilities for the co-operation of various organisations. A computing resource can be offered by one organisation and it can be remotely used by customers, i.e. other organisations or individuals, to perform some task or access some service on it. Such a resource not only has to be provided for a suitable price but, additionally, it has to be deployed in an efficient way, promising a good performance in service provision to satisfy the customers. Because existing infrastructures have to be integrated and used in the service provision process, it becomes necessary to develop new concepts for the management of the arising service-oriented distributed systems and the resources involved. This paper discusses a mechanism for the performance management of services in distributed environments. A service trader is used as a central component, supporting a customer in choosing a suitable service while considering the global state of the distributed system's resources using a load balancer. Management proxies encapsulate services or service groups and observe the performance and availability characteristics of the resources involved in a service usage process to fulfil the quality characteristics of a mediated service. This approach is designed to cause minimal involvement of service providers and customers in the selection and management process.