Over the coming years, many are anticipating grid computing infrastructure, utilities and services to become an integral part of future socio-economical fabric. However, factors such as; cost of access, reliability and dependability of the technology will undoubtedly influence its adoption and widespread. Though, IBM between the many are promoting autonomic computing as a solution to alleviate such concerns by delegating software systems' own management, security, reliability and performance tuning to the software itself. Based on an on-going research work, focusing on high-assurance concerns of widely distributed systems, this paper will outline a service-oriented approach and associated service infrastructure description languages, which are used to facilitate the construction and management of ad-hoc federated software services.