Automating the Provisioning of Application Services with the BPEL4WS Workflow Language
Abstract
We describe the architecture and implementation of a workflow-driven provisioning system for application services, such as multi-tiered e-Commerce systems. These systems need to be dynamically provisioned to accomodate rapid changes in the workload patterns in order to meet performance objectives. This, in turn, requires a highly automated service provisioning process, for which we were able to leverage a general-purpose workflow language and its execution engine. We have successfully integrated a workflow-based change management system with a commercial service provisioning system that allows the execution of automatically generated change plans as well as the monitoring of their execution.