Service Modeling Realization

When we enable a platform / a set of capabilities for consumption through the enablement of custom development, some of the points to be considered for wider reach .

Wider reach means to provide flexibility such as facilitating development on heterogeneous platform through supporting interoperability, various communication protocols and data encoding formats.

• Data encoding format – XML, JSON
• Protocol – Http , Tcp-ip
• Type of communication - Synchronous / Asynchronous communication
• Consumption  type – Proxy objects, RESTful communication

In addition to this, other key infrastructure & administration related factors to be considered are:

• Reliability – Data submitted is not lost. The infrastructure behind the service model should be reliable without losing any submitted messages that is submitted

• Security  - Integration with the consumer’s security infrastructure

• Performance – Of course, first & fire most requirement of any exposed services and will be governed by SLAs

• Service Metering – very important especially in the “pay per use” model

• Centralized Dashboard – for the consumers to have insight into logs & exceptions

Frist point in consideration in realizing a service model is to select a platform that has the potential to offer various required capabilities. For example, Windows Communication Foundation from Microsoft provides lots of options to provide flexibility such as :

• Encoding – Plain text for interoperability, Binary to optimize performance, MTOM for large payloads
• Channels – one way, Duplex , Request-Response, Streaming
• WS-*
• WS-Addressing – extra additions to SOAP headers which makes SOAP free from underlying transport protocol
• WS-Security,WS-Trust,WS-SecureConversation
• WS-ReliableMessaging
• WS-Coordination , WS-AtomicTransaction
• WS-Policy (for more dynamic features of a service), WS-Metadataexchange

So, for a successful realization of a Service Model, choosing a capable platform is very much important !