Per-request contracts for web services transactions

To allow providers to keep their autonomy and ensure the overall system can run satisfactorily, it is common practice in the Web Services environment for providers to reduce the strength of some of the traditionally required ACID properties when offering transactional support. However, current standards require providers to offer a constant level of transactional support for each operation they provide. We describe a method that allows service providers to dynamically decide on the level of transactional support to offer for each client request. This allows the provider to base the level of transactional support offered on the current state of the system and internal logic, resulting in potential benefits for both service providers and consumers.