A systematic approach for migrating web services to grid platforms for business data processing applications

摘要

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has become increasingly popular as it offers a technology-independent view of systems and is enabled by Web Service technologies. It is being adopted by many businesses to implement their business processes on top of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). As the demand of these business processes grow, it is increasingly difficult to scale the service from both software and hardware perspectives. Although there are computing concepts such as Grid Computing and Utility Computing which allow businesses to achieve this by making architectural changes, there is currently a lack of academic literature and practical knowledge that can be used by business software developers to take advantage of these computing concepts. In this thesis, we choose to model key architectural decisions that are critical to a Web Service to Grid Service migration. We formalize the corresponding design process using the Architectural Decision-Making Support (ADEMS) framework, which is a systematic, quantitative, disciplined and methodological approach for designing complex systems. In order to validate the benefits and practicality this process can bring to businesses, we apply it to a realistic case study in the capital market industry. The results indicate that this approach can provide business stakeholders the first step in reasoning about optimal architectural decision choices for further developments. The thesis concludes by providing avenues for future work towards formalizing& design processes for service-oriented systems.