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web services and the grid are converging! the prospect of grid-based, commodity computers delivering run anywhere, anytime web services across the internet has hype-o-meters showing a speedy rise and marketing departments gearing up everywhere. standards are still winding their way through community processes and early adopter products are just coming to market, but that hasnt stopped some industry watchers from proclaiming "grid services" the next big thing. the butler group, for example, sees the coming boom in grid services dwarfing even the internet in terms of its impact, as they transform it from a products-based to a services-oriented industry. irrational exuberance? maybe not. the coupling of web services strong standards heritage with the grids experience securing and managing resources in heterogeneous environments could create a boon for soa, b2b and ecommerce. the answer ultimately lies in the web services communitys ability to turn the grids strengths into standards, reference implementations, and products as part of the convergence.
ben worthen, in his september 2002 article for cio magazine, titled "web services still not ready for prime time," singled out security and reliability as two major hurdles web services needed to overcome before being ready for prime time. he saw the lack of standard security protocols as an issue for all but a few firms wanting to use web services on the internet, and the absence of an "open-line, telephone-like connection" derailing b2b and e-commerce applications by undermining the reliability of machine-to-machine transactions. two years, dozens of standards later, and the problems remain. can the grids influence change the equation?
addressing the security problem
security on the internet, by its very nature, is problematic. the internet operates as a confederation of independent domains where each domain potentially has its own domain authority and security policies. figure 1 illustrates some of the problems this creates for web services applications. in the example, a user interacts with a web service, service a, running in security domain a. domain a uses x.509 certificates for authentication and authorization. service a uses a second service, service b, running in security domain b, that uses kerberos. service b, in turn, uses service c, running... 下一页