Particular embodiments facilitate life-cycle management and utilization of network resources, such as web or other application services. One embodiment provides instancing, virtualization, and dynamic provisioning functionality facilitating management and utilization of web services. One embodiment combines the virtualization and dynamic provisioning functionality to facilitate the development of client application code in routed web services network architectures. One embodiment provides a set of management functions that may be applied to management of computing resources in any IP-based network.