Managed utility computing: The grid as management backplane

Enterprise IT exhibits increasingly complex networked systems and distributed applications, making the task of an IT operator or administrator exceedingly difficult. We argue in the keynote associated with this paper for the necessity of a clean, standardized, service-centric software architecture to automate and facilitate operator tasks throughout the life-cycle of systems and applications. We refer to the proposed solution as 'managed utility computing,' since it enables utility computing while improving manageability. The proposed architecture is a web services based 'grid' architecture, with targeted management extensions. This short note argues that this architecture is also necessary and appropriate as backplane for traditional management software (irrespective of the utility computing context), to support increasingly complex management tasks for increasingly complex systems.