Commercial of-the-shelf (COTS) middleware is gaining acceptance in the distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) community as (1) the cost and time required to develop and verify DRE systems preclude developers from implementing these systems from scratch and (2) implementations of the OMG’s Real-time CORBA (RT-CORBA) specification mature. Although RT-CORBA standardizes the mechanisms to configure and control underlying OS supports for application’s real-time requirements, it does not yet provide sufficient abstractions to separate RT quality-of-service (QoS) policy configurations from application functionality. Developers are therefore forced to configure QoS policies in an ad hoc way and the code to configure these policies is often scattered throughout parts of a DRE system, which makes it hard for developers to configure, validate, modify, and evolve complex DRE systems consistently. The tight-coupling of policy aspects with application logic is inherent to the CORBA 2.x object model. This coupling is carried forward into derivative specifications that focus on QoS properties, such as the Real-Time CORBA 1.0 and 2.0 specifications. The OMG has addressed many of the limitations of the CORBA 2.x object model in the CORBA Component Model (CCM). However, QoS properties are not considered in the CCM specification. In the CCM, application functionality can be defined in components installed in generic application servers. Application servers use containers to interact and provide QoS support for installed components. Component composition and QoS requirements are specified using metadata stored in XML format that need not be committed by the developers until deployment time. Exposing this information in XML format allows us to extend the standard Document Type Definitions (DTDs) in the CCM to support custom policies unobtrusively using distinct namespaces. It is our position that the DRE community can benefit from CCM capabilities to provide a more robust DRE development environment. By extending the CCM to support component deployment metadata for QoS policies such as real-time priorities, DRE systems can be composed from existing components while applying various QoS policies. This capability not only reduces the cost of developing DRE applications, it also makes it possible to analyze the consistency of QoS policies applied throughout a system. To validate our approach, we are developing an implementation of the CCM called the Component-IntegratedACE ORB (CIAO), which combines mechanisms to configure Real-time CORBA features more flexibly and robustly. Below, we outline how we support deployable QoS policies in CIAO: