Architecture & Infrastructure

The third of the S-Cube technology layers provides infrastructure capabilities for defining basic communication patterns and interactions involving as well as providing facilities for providing, for example, contextual and qualitative information about a service's and their client's environment and performance. Providing these capabilities to other layers allows service developers to use contextual information when building service based systems and provide cross layer and pro-active monitoring and adaptation of services (see research challenges). This chapter provides an overview of service infrastructures for the adaptation, monitoring and management of services which will provide these functions and concludes with a discussion of more detailed research challenges in the context of service infrastructures and their management.