Publications

Sven van der Meer

Middleware and Management, Concepts, Characteristics and Integration

Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG)
Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT)

vdmeer@tssg.org

Do current management frameworks offer answers to the new questions? Are they applicable for future applications, services, and resources? Answers to those questions can be given after analyzing current trends in communication and computing and after evaluating the actual level of interworking and integration of management and middleware. Doing this, the answer is no, under most favorable conditions maybe.

The current situation can be described by the interworking (not the integration) of middleware and management systems. Furthermore, the available information sources within companies and organizations rely on many different solutions for storing data. They are still waiting to be harmonized. In short, this situation can be described as follows.

  1. Distributed applications can access classic management systems via ‘gateways’ that translate specifications and interactions.
  2. Legacy management systems are used to manage distributed applications. Providers and operators use their running management systems to administrate distributed applications. Thus, the investment for the education of this staff is not wasted but reused for distributed applications.
  3. A few middleware concepts and many different products are used in parallel. Most of them provide mechanisms for interworking (that means for the invocation of operations and the exchange of information). The information exchange often needs an informal agreement of developers on semantic. Each middleware concept includes basic management functionality on object level (e.g. based on the clustering concepts of ODP3). Furthermore, "middleware developers strive to support applications that meet the technical challenges of ubiquitous computing".
  4. Service platforms form a layer of abstraction enabling service creation and deployment, monitoring of distributed applications, and integration of legacy systems. Within those platforms, the management of services is included by means of the support of tools for the definition of services and business roles, an execution environment for services, and the management of the platform itself.

Management is defined as all activities needed to operate communication networks and services in a secure and effective way. It identifies methods and provides tools to support configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and administration of these networks and their services. The target vision is to support user and provider in planning and operating networks and distributed systems. Nevertheless, middleware and service platforms do not reflect management standards sufficiently. Each of them comes with a new concept for managing objects or services. Furthermore, development of middleware does not follow management principles. The components object specifications, protocols, and data formats are designed specifically to support distribution. Here, an integration of management concepts into these components can be an important step.

Distributed applications define new requirements, which middleware and management need to address. Applications and devices are not realized with a single technology. Devices and network appliances need to be accessed in a technology independent manner. Specifications must be independent of dedicated vendors. At the same time, the support of autonomy of operators and vendors is needed to enable them to offer clearly distinguishable products. These are basics for cooperative environments in a competitive world.