Hive Computing and Web Services

Many organizations are beginning to explore the potential of Web Services. This new approach — which involves enabling systems to communicate with each other over the Internet — promises to enable businesses to more quickly respond to changes in the marketplace.

The problem is that the vision of Web Services is focused on defining how systems will work together; it does not focus on how businesses can guarantee the those Web Services are delivered in a reliable manner.

Hive Computing solves this problem.

Hive Computing enables businesses to deploy Web Services in a manner that is both highly reliable and extremely affordable.

A Hive is reliable because it is built from large numbers of individual computers which work together in a seamless and transparent manner.

A Hive is affordable because these individual computers can be built using low cost, commodity hardware instead of expensive servers.

The programming model that lies behind Hive Computing is an excellent fit with the development and deployment of Web Services.

At the most basic level, a Hive is designed to perform some number of Services. These Services can be used to perform a large number of transaction-oriented functions. These Services are implemented using an XML-based process flow and some number of C/C++ or Java-based Tasks.