Approaches to provide proactive Web service QoS

Service providers can proactively provide high QoS to the service requestors, by using different familiar approaches like caching and load balancing of service requests. Caching and load balancing can be done at both Web server level and at Web application server level. Load balancing prioritize various types of traffic and ensure that each request is treated appropriately to the business value it represents.

A Web service provider can perform capacity modeling to create a top-down model of request-traffic, current capacity utilization, and the resulting QoS. A service provider can also categorize Web service traffic by the volume of traffic, traffic for different application service categories, and traffic from different sources. This will help in understanding the capacity that will be required to provide good QoS for a volume of service demand and for future planning like capacity and type of load balancing Web application servers and/or Web servers (for example, the number of servers required for setting up a clustered server farm).

Service providers can provide differentiated servicing by using the capacity model to determine the capacity needed for different customers and service types and by ensuring appropriate QoS levels for different applications and customers. For example, a multimedia Web service might require good throughput, but a banking Web service might require security and transactional QoS.