* Web services might impact traffic mgmt.
In the history of the telecommunications industry, having new applications appear without warning and wreak havoc with network traffic planning is relatively commonplace. For example, e-mail consumed relatively little bandwidth and had only minimal effect on network performance until people suddenly started sending send group e-mails with attached Word, Excel and PowerPoint files consisting of a few megabytes each.
We think we may be on the verge of yet another of these hiccups in traffic analysis and network planning. As a major movement on the applications development front, Web services seem to be barely on the radar of many networking professionals.
One definition for Web services, according to a current survey at Webtorials, reads as follows: “A standardized way of integrating applications using open standards (like XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) over an Internet Protocol backbone. These ‘Web services’ do not provide the user with an interface – like a browser-based Web page. Rather, they provide an application-to-application interface for programs. You could think of this as having ‘subroutines’ or ‘objects’ for a program available across the IP network – either internally or externally – for highly distributed computing.”
While this terminology for Web services seems to have wide acceptance among applications developers, the preliminary results from the Webtorials survey indicate that this is not anywhere near the commonly accepted terminology among the networking crowd.
The part of this that concerns us is that once again, the network is in danger of being blind-sided by applications that we’re not ready to control. As Web services begin to be deployed across the WAN, they hold tremendous promise. But you need to make sure that you’re ready to provide appropriate bandwidth and performance management for these apps.
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be addressing this topic further by exploring how well traffic monitoring and management products are prepared to help provide this support. Of course, we’ll also let you know more about the survey results.
In the meantime, we would really appreciate your weighing in on this topic by taking the survey at Webtorials. It’s designed to take less than five minutes of your time, and by the time you receive this newsletter, we’ll add a question to make sure that your having read this newsletter doesn’t prejudice the overall results.
