REST-based Management of Loosely Coupled Services

Applications increasingly make use of the distributed platform that the World Wide Web provides — be it as a Software-as-a-Service such as salesforce.com, an application infrastructure such as facebook.com, or a computing infrastructure such as a "cloud". A common characteristic of applications of this kind is that they are deployed on infrastructure or make use of components that reside in different management domains. Current service management approaches and systems, however, often rely on a centrally managed configuration management database (CMDB), which is the basis for centrally orchestrated service management processes, in particular change management and incident management. The distribution of management responsibility of WWW based applications requires a decentralized approach to service management. This paper proposes an approach of decentralized service management based on distributed configuration management and service process co-ordination, making use RESTful access to configuration information and ATOM-based distribution of updates as a novel foundation for service management processes.