A survey of public web services

Abstract

Enterprise IT infrastructures and their interfaces are migrating toward a service-oriented architecture, using Web Services (WS) as a de-facto implementation protocol. As a result, WS-generated traffic is expected to have a considerable impact on the Internet. Despite the high amount of interest in WS, there have been few studies regarding their characteristics. In this survey, we analyze publicly-accessible WS over a 9 month period. We study the evolution and distributions of the WS population, and message characteristics and response times of each WS. We also closely analyze two popular WS sites: Amazon and Google. Some of our initial results contradict common intuition. The number of public WS has not increased dramatically, although there are signs which indicate intensive ongoing activities in the WS domain. The geographic distribution of public WS is largely skewed. Most importantly, the sizes of WS responses and their variation are smaller than those of the existing Web objects.