Web Services for Integrated Management: A Case Study

As evidenced by discussions in standards organizations, vendors and the user community have recently showed a growing interest in using XML technologies for management purposes. To investigate the relevance of this approach, we have added support for Web Services to JAMAP (a Java-based research prototype of a management platform) and managed a gigabit transoceanic testbed. In this paper, we present the main lessons learned during this process and attempt to draw conclusions of general interest as to the applicability of Web Services for managing IP networks and systems. Our main conclusions are that XML, WSDL and SOAP are useful, especially for configuration management, whereas UDDI is not adequate. To date, we still lack a standard way of publishing, discovering and subscribing to Web Services for the purpose of managing network devices and systems.