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“Ensure that your developers and designers are capable of applying the right blend of business
and technical intelligence to every Web service.” How much do you tip a developer? Well, that depends on how good the service is. …OK, let’s officially end my sad career in IT comedy by moving on to the importance of ensuring that your development (and design) staff has the proper skills to build and integrate Web services. If they are new to this platform, you may not want to just hand them a book and ask them to “go figure it out.”
Here’s why:
13.5.1 Use a private service registry Once Web services establish themselves as a common part of your enterprise, they will begin to evolve, requiring interface upgrades and spawning new generations of services. Pretty soon, it will be difficult to keep track of the many service interfaces, especially since some will always be in a state of transition. (To learn more about private registries and UDDI, read through the tutorial in Chapter 4.)
Centralize service descriptions in a service repository “Incorporate a private service registry to centralize published service descriptions into one accessible resource.”
A private service registry can house the collective descriptions of all your Web services. It acts as the central repository for current service interface information to which anyone interested will go to discover and learn about an enterprise’s service framework.
Its use has immediate benefits, including:
Make the use of a service registry mandatory “Require the use of a private service registry and keep it current. Otherwise it won’t be useful.”
If people lose confidence in a service registry, it can quickly become the least popular part of your IT environment. If you locate a service interface in a local UDDI registry, and you’re not sure it is the latest version, you won’t be inclined to use it. Instead, you’ll probably phone around until you find the original service developer, from whom you’ll get the most recent WSDL file.
If, however, the use of this registry is a requirement that is strictly adhered to, it will become a core part of your administrative infrastructure, supporting development projects as a resource centre for published Web service endpoints.
Assign a resource to maintain the registry “To make enterprise service registries a functional part of an organization, assign a Service Library Manager.”
Private service registries need to provide a high level of availability and dependability. Not only will the registry serve individuals who manually search it for various service details, it may also need to facilitate dynamic discovery. At that point, it could become a critical resource.
The best way to ensure that a registry is kept current and available is to assign ownership of these responsibilities. Maintaining a service registry is a unique job, in that it involves an uncommon combination of skills. XWIF provides a description of this role, and calls it the Service Library Manager.
Such a resource becomes especially important if your organization opens its registry to external business partners. In that case, the Service Library Manager also needs to manage the authentication and authorization of users from outside of the organization.
1.5.1.3.1 Service library manager Responsible for maintaining the service library and the local UDDI registry, this individual may need to be included in official application design reviews so that proposed service designs can be evaluated and compared against existing and other planned services.
The Service Library Manager will also own the organization's utility services. Any changes required to these services will need to be approved by the library manager, and implemented in such a way that they are sufficiently generic for future use, and do not break existing interfaces already in use by service requestors.
Responsible for:
An often overlooked aspect of projects implementing service-oriented applications are the subsequent maintenance tasks required to keep these environments going.
“Be prepared for the costs and complexities in administering a service-oriented enterprise.”
Increased interoperability results in a higher amount of dependencies between application environments, namely their Web service endpoints. With a high level of integration comes the responsibility of keeping your Web services running smoothly, regardless of what’s thrown at them. High usage volumes, error conditions, and other environmental variables need to be anticipated.
Entire product suites are available to maintain Web services, although many are platform specific. If you are deploying Web services without such an environment, administration can eventually become an overly burdensome task. You may want to prevent this from happening by investigating some of the application hosting environments offered by service-oriented EAI solutions.
Either way, administration costs need to be properly represented in project budgets. Otherwise, the support infrastructure required by service-oriented architectures will not be sufficient. This, in turn, can jeopardize the success of the application and those that integrate with it.
XWIF introduces the service administrator role, a resource responsible for the maintenance and monitoring of these hosting environments.
Service administrator
In an environment where many Web services are deployed and utilized, an administration system needs to be in place in order to ensure a reliable runtime hosting environment. Service administrators need to be proficient in the use of maintenance and monitoring tools.
They will be the ones who need to respond to production issues relating to the availability and performance of Web services. This role is similar to that of a webmaster for a Web site. The administrator is required to keep track of usage statistics and look out for (and preemptively avoid) performance bottlenecks.
This position is especially relevant in organizations offering Web services that can be accessed externally. In order to effectively handle unpredictable usage volumes, the administrator must to be able to respond quickly when performance trends start heading south.
In EAI environments, this role is often assumed by the same person managing the integration brokers. Typical responsibilities include:
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: February 21, 2004
URL: http://webreference.com/programming/soa2/1
