Re: [soa-rm-ra] Groups - Modification of Policy_Contract_Businessdiagram (OASIS_Policy-Contract_Diagram.JPG) uploaded

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

Correct.

Policy - unilateral constraint declarations which , if not observed, may
result in denial of service interaction.

Contract - a bilateral or multilateral agreement to be bound by the terms of
one or more set(s) of policies.

Duane


On 5/5/07 11:11 AM, "Francis McCabe" <frankmccabe@mac.com> wrote:

> A quick follow up,
> 
> It is also not fair to say that a contract is *more* than a policy.
> 
> The distinction between them refers to the origin of the constraint:
> a policy originates with a single participant (or proxy etc.) a
> contract originates in an agreement between participants.
> 
> 
> On May 5, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Francis McCabe wrote:
> 
>> Again, I need to get completely clear on something:
>> 
>> It is *not* reasonable to state:
>> 
>> Contract is not only more than a Policy but also more than a SLA
>> 
>> In some limited areas, you may constrain SLAs to focus on things
>> like bandwidth etc., but other businesses will use SLAs to govern
>> things like business opening hours, response times for service and
>> so on.
>> 
>> So, again, I do not yet see a particularly strong case for
>> distinguishing SLAs from contracts.
>> 
>> Certainly for our architecture we need to be as encompassing as
>> required to support business via services, not simply to build yet
>> another IT infrastructure.
>> 
>> Frank
>> 
>> On May 5, 2007, at 10:53 AM, michael.poulin@uk.fid-intl.com wrote:
>> 
>>> I have a strong impression that in our March discussion about
>>> Contract & Policies we  have agreed that Contract is not only more
>>> than a Policy but also more than a SLA. The SLA is explicitly
>>> measurable (run-time) set of service attributes/characteristics/
>>> actions while a Contract can contain Commitments of the contract
>>> participants that 1) are not visible through the service
>>> interface; 2) may be not measured at run-time. I guess, it is the
>>> time for me to show my version of a Service Contract Template we
>>> are discussing in my organisation ( I will be able to do it not
>>> earlier than on Tuesday next week).
>>> 
>>> I have described an example of such contract  in my article "Does
>>> Web Services makes a Service for SOA?" In particular, a service
>>> provider was obliged to gather audit info on all actions requested
>>> by particular client and failed in it because its database was not
>>> available for some time and several audit messages got lost.
>>> If we are building high level RA, we cannot discard the scenario
>>> I've just described.
>>> That is, Contract is an agreed container of all service related
>>> actions performed by the provider's SW system(s). With such
>>> definition, I do know what to do in IT with Service Contract.
>>> 
>>> Nevertheless, I am still unclear on Contract-Policy relationship
>>> issue...
>>> 
>>> - Michael
>> 
>