OGSA Grid service requirements

From the OGSA perspective, a grid environment consists of typically few persistent and potentially

many transient Grid services. All Grid services must comply with the OGSA-required interface

specifications to enable reliable and secure management of a distributed state of virtual resources.

The following are some of the key capabilities that the OGSA Service Model

requires a compliant Grid service to provide:

Creation: This refers to creating new instances of resources associated with a Grid service via an

operation. An instance can be newly created or be initialized from a persistent state of a resource.

Global naming and references: Once we have an instance of a resource, a grid environment requires

a unique network-aware reference to a resource instance with information about how to interact

with the instance via the Grid service.

Lifetime management: The lifetime management operation defines the life-span of a resource,

mainly dependent on whether a resource expires after a certain time period or immediately.

Registration and discovery: This set of operations refers to the ability to find Grid service instances

and their associated deploy-time and run-time meta data.

Notification: The notifications are asynchronous messaging mechanisms to notify subscribing

clients of certain events such as resource life-time events, property changes, and so on.

The OGSA Grid services also address authorization, concurrency control, and manageability

aspects.

There are two standards currently available to implement OGSA-compliant Grid services:

Open Grid Services Interface (OGSI) Grid services

Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) Grid services

Both frameworks provide mechanisms to implement OGSA-compliant Grid services in different

ways.