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Service Delivery Contracts : Managing Outcomes for SOA and Business Integration January 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DELIVERY CONTRACTS™ ................................................... 2 CONTRACTS AND POLICIES .................................................................................................... 3 END-TO-END GOVERNANCE LIFECYCLE ................................................................................. 4 DESIGN TIME ........................................................................................................................ 4 RUN TIME ............................................................................................................................. 5 CHANGE TIME ....................................................................................................................... 6 CONTRACTS AS THE BASIS FOR AGILE IT SYSTEMS ................................................................. 7 CONFIGURATION ................................................................................................................... 7 COMPOSITION ....................................................................................................................... 7 CUSTOMIZATION ................................................................................................................... 8 MODEL FOR BUSINESS SERVICES .......................................................................................... 8 HOW IT WORKS......................................................................................................................... 9 REGISTERING PROVIDERS AND CONSUMERS ........................................................................... 9 DEFINING THE CONTRACT...................................................................................................... 9 IDENTIFYING THE CONSUMER APPLICATION ............................................................................. 9 DETERMINING CONSUMER PREFERENCES ............................................................................... 9 FACILITATING REUSE ............................................................................................................. 9 CONTRACT TERMS ................................................................................................................ 10 SECURITY ........................................................................................................................... 10 OPERATIONS ...................................................................................................................... 10 INTEGRATION ...................................................................................................................... 10 BUSINESS ........................................................................................................................... 10 EXTENSIBLE TERMS ............................................................................................................. 10 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 11 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ........................................................................................................... 11
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 1
INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DELIVERY CONTRACTS™ Services Delivery Contracts™, the innovative, patent pending, core feature in the webMethods Infravio X-Registry, governs the relationships between the providing and consuming applications, provides governance of services across the End-to-End Service Lifecycle, facilitates services reuse, and increases business agility as organizations move toward a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). As more companies use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as part of their overall IT strategy, managing policies are a central issue. Companies want to identify and authorize both service providers and service consumers. They want to control, manage, and track the interactions between providers and consumers at every step of the lifecycle, as they build their SOA to improve productivity and reduce costs. The Services Delivery Contract™ (SDC) allows designers to create generic services and then define delivery terms such as security, routing, SLA, data transformation or monitoring that are specific to the consuming application. The result is a governance environment that provides a greater understanding of services throughout their lifecycle, a view of the consumer, the ability to deliver the service according to specific requirements or preferences of each application, and a deeper understanding of how the Services are being used that extends from End-to-End of the Services Governance Lifecycle. SOA Analyst firm Zapthink refers to contracts as the “Lifeblood of your SOA.” Service Delivery Contracts™ enable deployed systems to be changed using simple metadata configuration as opposed to expensive software customization. Contracts are a key capability for loosely coupled services—enabling rapid and cost effective customer on-ramping and business integration. This technology brief details patent-pending implementation of this key SOA technology.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 2
Contracts and Policies One of the essential roles of Service Oriented Architecture is the ability to manage policies. A policy is a general rule or principle which applies to a field of activity. Contracts are much less general purpose—a contract exists in the context of policies—and should be compliant with available policies. What makes a contract distinct from a policy are the notions of identity and agreement. Identity is an essential component, as a contract binds to and structures the relationship between identified service providers and consumers. In addition, agreement establishes the bi-directionality of the contract terms.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 3
End-to-End Governance Lifecycle Governance is simply the application and enforcement of policies on services. webMethods has identified six distinct phases of the SOA Governance Lifecycle.
• • • • • •
Architecture/Plan Design Time Management Deploy/Run Time Service Use Change Time
The three primary phases of the End-to-End lifecycle are the Design Time, the Run Time and the Change Time.
Design Time Design Time is primarily an IT development function. Contracts are another form of service metadata which enables developers to “configure” services.
Traditionally, metadata configuration parameters created in design time are stored in “deployment descriptors” and other such files. This provides the valuable function of externalizing the metadata from the core of your IT systems and services. Unfortunately, externalizing Service Contracts into deployment descriptors has several disadvantages.
There are numerous disadvantages of using run time container specific “deployment descriptors” for storing SOA Configurations. Container specific deployment descriptors suffer from the following problems: • • • • • •
Cannot be accessed by business users during Change Time Cannot be centrally managed Cannot be governed in an SOA context Are tightly coupled to the services and containers Cannot be applied across platforms Cannot be reused at Run Time
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 4
Run Time Run Time is primarily the domain of IT operations people. The Run Time enforcement of contracts are executed through an intermediary.
Consumer
A Contract represents a configuration appropriate to a consumer-provider pair
Contracts are storedn… in the Repository. Contract
Intermediary
They are enforced by the Intermediary.
Repository
Service Intermediaries serve as the policy enforcement points for Service Oriented Architecture. The ability to enforce policy forms a “policy boundary”, a distributed container within which an organization exerts its influence. In the past, the ability to control and manage applications was restricted to a physical container such as a mainframe. With intermediation, a distributed network of machines can all be set within a policy managed context. Contracts are metadata configurations applied to consumer provider pairs. These relationships are defined and stored in the Registry/Repository, in our case it is the webMethods Infravio X-Registry product.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 5
Change Time The Change Time of the Governance Lifecycle is typically managed by a business user. Business users are frequently responsible for managing relationships—and Contracts are a loosely coupled way to change the configuration of relationships.
Service Contracts are associated with specific consumer provider pairs. The basic terms that can be configured include: • Security (e.g. Authentication, Authorization, Encryption ) • Operational (e.g. Logging, Monitoring, SLA, Alerting, Reporting, Routing) • Routing (e.g. Load Balancing, Fail-over, Content-Based routing) • Lifecycle (e.g. Versioning, Deprecation Rules) • Custom (i.e. user defined terms) In the X-Registry product, development staff, IT operations staff and business users can all access contracts through a user-friendly web-based interface.
While contracts are impressively easy to change, the model of Change Time Governance ensures that the changes will be appropriately reviewed and that enterprise policy and regulatory policy compliance will be ensured.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 6
Contracts as the basis for agile IT systems
Registries and Repositories enable IT systems to externalize change in the form of metadata. webMethods Infravio models this structure in three layers (as shown above)— the Configuration layer, the Composition layer and the Customization layer.
Configuration Policies and contracts are stored in the SOA Repository. These are documents which in some cases are human readable and in some cases machine readable. Service Delivery Contracts™ makes contract documents readable by both humans and machines. Business users can easily manage and make configuration changes to deployed services through the Repository. It is a best practice to model the fastest changing aspects of your business in this topmost layer. This makes changing in response to business requirements faster and easier. One way to think about this layer is that it should contain information about Who consumes the service, Where and When do they consume it, and How all of these aspects reflect unique capabilities, limitations and preferences of the service consumer.
Composition This layer supports the highly touted Composite Application Development strategy. This is a form of service reuse which consists of two main categories: aggregate applications and orchestrated applications. Aggregate applications are simple scenarios where
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 7
services consume one or more other services. In some cases, aggregate applications are built within a portal context. These services are usually consumed synchronously. The other type of composite application is the orchestrated service.
Orchestrated services are those in which a sequence of services is triggered, often asynchronously. These services are sometimes referred to as workflow services. These can either be constructed using workflow Run Time systems such as BPEL, or they can be implemented using a stateful service which “visits” the other services in sequence. Use of workflow Run Time systems are more advanced, and less frequently seen in commercial deployments—emerging standards like BPEL would provide reusable workflows and simple modeling tools, but it is still early days for such technology. A useful way of thinking about this layer is that it should model how your business services are delivered (process). These processes should not change as frequently as the configuration layer. Adapting business processes is often evolutionary in nature and a process of optimization.
Customization Any software development that happens “below” the service interface is software customization. This is the most expensive and time consuming style of development and it typically takes place in full programming environments such as Java or .Net. Best practices for this layer would have it that this layer should model what business services your organization delivers. Hopefully, the services your organization delivers should be reasonably stable and not changing much over time.
Model for Business Services Within these three layers forms the basis for modeling Who, Where, When, How and What services are delivered. Why you deliver your services should be self-evident. By modeling your business services using these three conceptual layers, you can build your architecture for Change Time—externalizing the fastest changing parts of your business as easily reconfigurable metadata. Service Delivery Contracts™ enable business users to implement changes directly in deployed services. This enables the direct configuration of business relationships through a browser interface. This can result in dramatically lower costs and improved
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 8
management of customer relationships. The topmost layer of the model shown above is the policy and contract layer.
HOW IT WORKS Registering providers and consumers When using X-Registry, both providers and consumers of services are registered and authorized in a central repository. The roles-based self-registration process gives IT control over who provides services and which applications consume those services.
Defining the Contract The X-Registry Services Delivery Contract contains configurable security, operations, integration and business terms that define how a service is delivered by a provider to a consuming application. After registering and authorizing service providers and consumers, a contract is established using the X-Registry Configurator. At Run Time, the X-Broker distributed broker enforces the contract terms. It is also possible to enforce contract terms through a third-party intermediary. Operations management is then done through the X-Registry console, or through third-party systems management products integrated with X-Registry and X-Broker.
Identifying the consumer application By securing services using Service Delivery Contracts, it now becomes possible to authenticate the consumer application before invoking the actual service.
Determining consumer preferences The contract determines how a service provider delivers the service to one or more service consumers based on the preferences or contract terms. A contract is usually specific to one or more consumer applications. This allows specification of different delivery or operational terms according to the preferences of the consumer applications as shown in the figure below. If no specific consumers are specified in a contract, it is called an “Open Contract”, which makes it equivalent to a policy that can be used by unidentified consumer applications.
Facilitating reuse Service Delivery Contracts™ allow the service to focus on the business logic while the delivery requirements are configured in the contract. This separation of the delivery preferences from the service itself makes it easier to reuse the service for multiple consumer applications with different delivery requirements. As an example, the same order entry service can now be used for a portal application and for a Call Center application, each one having its own delivery terms specified. The portal application may only require an LDAP authentication but the Call Center application may require Netegrity authentication as well as data transformation to match different data definitions.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 9
CONTRACT TERMS Contract terms are configurable properties defined by the services administrator or provider of the service. Contract terms are categorized in security, operations, integration and business terms.
Security Services can be easily secured by configuring the security term of the Contract. The X-Registry product provides WS-Security compliant support for authentication using a LDAP Directory Server or Microsoft Active Directory. Any other security system can be used by “plugging” it in using the X-Broker negotiator architecture. Additional security terms supported include encryption, digital signature, security alerts and logging.
Operations Operation terms include logging, monitoring and alert rules based on a set of event parameters. These events are classified as either sampling or aggregate and relate to transaction, lifecycle, performance or errors. Routing terms define how services are routed based on the content and context of the service request. Pre-defined routing templates provide easy solutions for fail-over, load balancing, SLA managing and versioning.
Integration Integration terms make it easy to connect disparate applications using services. They provide functionality typically found in EAI systems or an Enterprise System Bus (ESB), including data transformation, transport brokering and transaction integrity protection.
Business Business terms help optimize business processes and deliver visibility into business transactions. They define Content-Based Routing (CBR), business alerts and the feeding of Run Time data to Business Activity Monitoring and Billing and Metering systems. For instance, an out-of-stock response to an order request can be routed to a provisioning system for a replenishment request and the customizable ability to generate an alert to the sales department.
Extensible terms Using the X-Registry Handler Plug-in API, contract terms can be expanded either by adding new choices to existing terms or defining new terms. An example of a new choice for an existing term would be invoking a home built or a third-party security mechanism. An example of defining and adding a new term might be adding a contract term for billing which would invoke a billing system to track the usage of a service by a consumer. The new billing term could refuse further service if the consuming application reaches its credit limit.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 10
CONCLUSION webMethods’ patent-pending Service Delivery Contracts™ provides a powerful way to increase loose coupling and business agility of your IT infrastructure. In business, the fastest changing aspects often involve business relationships with customers, suppliers and partners. Because of this, it is helpful to have a flexible and configurable layer in which to model these relationships parametrically and declaratively. Business users can directly configure business and technical relationship parameters associated with a service provider consumer pair. By configuring these terms in the context of the X-Registry product, deployed services can be reconfigured to meet the unique and changing needs of each service consumer.
About the Author Miko Matsumura is Vice President of SOA Product Marketing and Technology Standards at webMethods, Inc. He also serves as chair of the SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee at Oasis and is the organizer of the SOA Link Interoperability Initiative. Miko regularly speaks throughout the world on SOA issues, as well as blogs at www.SOAcenter.com.
Prior to the recent acquisition of Infravio, Inc. by webMethods, Miko served as Vice President of Marketing and Technology Standards at Infravio, where he led marketing operations and strategic planning. Matsumura emerged as an industry thought leader at The Middleware Company, where he was a co-creator responsible for building the partner program for SOA Blueprints, the first complete vendor-neutral specification of an SOA application set, supported by BEA, Borland, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Veritas and others. At Systinet, Matsumura worked with the executive team and offshore development center on product development, product strategy, and outbound marketing, including representing the company at industry events. At Sun Microsystems, Matsumura held the position of Chief Java Evangelist, where he was a visible spokesperson for Java technologies and worked closely with Java ISVs and licensees to further the developer community. Before joining Sun, Matsumura worked at Wired Digital (acquired by Lycos) and the Well online community (acquired by Salon). He has also worked extensively with software start-up companies, including Biztone and Kalepa Networks (acquired by Semio) raising more than 12 million in capital for Java start-ups.
Matsumura is currently a limited partner with Focus Ventures and was an advisor to the Asia Java Fund, as well as start-ups TogetherSoft (acquired by Borland), Dejima (acquired by Sybase) and Kendara (acquired by Excite). Matsumura holds an MBA from San Francisco State University and a Masters Degree in Neuroscience from Yale University.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 11
ABOUT WEBMETHODS, INC. webMethods provides business process integration to the world’s largest corporations and government agencies. webMethods flagship product suite, webMethods Fabric, is the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM, delivering rapid ROI to our 1,400 customers around the globe. With webMethods, customers can take a processcentric approach to their business problems, allowing them to leverage their existing IT assets, dramatically improve business process productivity and ROI, and rapidly create competitive advantage by making their business processes work harder for their company. webMethods (NASDAQ: WEBM) is headquartered in Fairfax, VA, and has offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan.
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©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved. The webMethods logo and Get There Faster are trademarks or registered trademarks of webMethods, Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective companies.
Service Delivery Contracts : Managing Outcomes for SOA and Business Integration January 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DELIVERY CONTRACTS™ ................................................... 2 CONTRACTS AND POLICIES .................................................................................................... 3 END-TO-END GOVERNANCE LIFECYCLE ................................................................................. 4 DESIGN TIME ........................................................................................................................ 4 RUN TIME ............................................................................................................................. 5 CHANGE TIME ....................................................................................................................... 6 CONTRACTS AS THE BASIS FOR AGILE IT SYSTEMS ................................................................. 7 CONFIGURATION ................................................................................................................... 7 COMPOSITION ....................................................................................................................... 7 CUSTOMIZATION ................................................................................................................... 8 MODEL FOR BUSINESS SERVICES .......................................................................................... 8 HOW IT WORKS......................................................................................................................... 9 REGISTERING PROVIDERS AND CONSUMERS ........................................................................... 9 DEFINING THE CONTRACT...................................................................................................... 9 IDENTIFYING THE CONSUMER APPLICATION ............................................................................. 9 DETERMINING CONSUMER PREFERENCES ............................................................................... 9 FACILITATING REUSE ............................................................................................................. 9 CONTRACT TERMS ................................................................................................................ 10 SECURITY ........................................................................................................................... 10 OPERATIONS ...................................................................................................................... 10 INTEGRATION ...................................................................................................................... 10 BUSINESS ........................................................................................................................... 10 EXTENSIBLE TERMS ............................................................................................................. 10 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 11 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ........................................................................................................... 11
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 1
INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DELIVERY CONTRACTS™ Services Delivery Contracts™, the innovative, patent pending, core feature in the webMethods Infravio X-Registry, governs the relationships between the providing and consuming applications, provides governance of services across the End-to-End Service Lifecycle, facilitates services reuse, and increases business agility as organizations move toward a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). As more companies use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as part of their overall IT strategy, managing policies are a central issue. Companies want to identify and authorize both service providers and service consumers. They want to control, manage, and track the interactions between providers and consumers at every step of the lifecycle, as they build their SOA to improve productivity and reduce costs. The Services Delivery Contract™ (SDC) allows designers to create generic services and then define delivery terms such as security, routing, SLA, data transformation or monitoring that are specific to the consuming application. The result is a governance environment that provides a greater understanding of services throughout their lifecycle, a view of the consumer, the ability to deliver the service according to specific requirements or preferences of each application, and a deeper understanding of how the Services are being used that extends from End-to-End of the Services Governance Lifecycle. SOA Analyst firm Zapthink refers to contracts as the “Lifeblood of your SOA.” Service Delivery Contracts™ enable deployed systems to be changed using simple metadata configuration as opposed to expensive software customization. Contracts are a key capability for loosely coupled services—enabling rapid and cost effective customer on-ramping and business integration. This technology brief details patent-pending implementation of this key SOA technology.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 2
Contracts and Policies One of the essential roles of Service Oriented Architecture is the ability to manage policies. A policy is a general rule or principle which applies to a field of activity. Contracts are much less general purpose—a contract exists in the context of policies—and should be compliant with available policies. What makes a contract distinct from a policy are the notions of identity and agreement. Identity is an essential component, as a contract binds to and structures the relationship between identified service providers and consumers. In addition, agreement establishes the bi-directionality of the contract terms.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 3
End-to-End Governance Lifecycle Governance is simply the application and enforcement of policies on services. webMethods has identified six distinct phases of the SOA Governance Lifecycle.
• • • • • •
Architecture/Plan Design Time Management Deploy/Run Time Service Use Change Time
The three primary phases of the End-to-End lifecycle are the Design Time, the Run Time and the Change Time.
Design Time Design Time is primarily an IT development function. Contracts are another form of service metadata which enables developers to “configure” services.
Traditionally, metadata configuration parameters created in design time are stored in “deployment descriptors” and other such files. This provides the valuable function of externalizing the metadata from the core of your IT systems and services. Unfortunately, externalizing Service Contracts into deployment descriptors has several disadvantages.
There are numerous disadvantages of using run time container specific “deployment descriptors” for storing SOA Configurations. Container specific deployment descriptors suffer from the following problems: • • • • • •
Cannot be accessed by business users during Change Time Cannot be centrally managed Cannot be governed in an SOA context Are tightly coupled to the services and containers Cannot be applied across platforms Cannot be reused at Run Time
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 4
Run Time Run Time is primarily the domain of IT operations people. The Run Time enforcement of contracts are executed through an intermediary.
Consumer
A Contract represents a configuration appropriate to a consumer-provider pair
Contracts are storedn… in the Repository. Contract
Intermediary
They are enforced by the Intermediary.
Repository
Service Intermediaries serve as the policy enforcement points for Service Oriented Architecture. The ability to enforce policy forms a “policy boundary”, a distributed container within which an organization exerts its influence. In the past, the ability to control and manage applications was restricted to a physical container such as a mainframe. With intermediation, a distributed network of machines can all be set within a policy managed context. Contracts are metadata configurations applied to consumer provider pairs. These relationships are defined and stored in the Registry/Repository, in our case it is the webMethods Infravio X-Registry product.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 5
Change Time The Change Time of the Governance Lifecycle is typically managed by a business user. Business users are frequently responsible for managing relationships—and Contracts are a loosely coupled way to change the configuration of relationships.
Service Contracts are associated with specific consumer provider pairs. The basic terms that can be configured include: • Security (e.g. Authentication, Authorization, Encryption ) • Operational (e.g. Logging, Monitoring, SLA, Alerting, Reporting, Routing) • Routing (e.g. Load Balancing, Fail-over, Content-Based routing) • Lifecycle (e.g. Versioning, Deprecation Rules) • Custom (i.e. user defined terms) In the X-Registry product, development staff, IT operations staff and business users can all access contracts through a user-friendly web-based interface.
While contracts are impressively easy to change, the model of Change Time Governance ensures that the changes will be appropriately reviewed and that enterprise policy and regulatory policy compliance will be ensured.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 6
Contracts as the basis for agile IT systems
Registries and Repositories enable IT systems to externalize change in the form of metadata. webMethods Infravio models this structure in three layers (as shown above)— the Configuration layer, the Composition layer and the Customization layer.
Configuration Policies and contracts are stored in the SOA Repository. These are documents which in some cases are human readable and in some cases machine readable. Service Delivery Contracts™ makes contract documents readable by both humans and machines. Business users can easily manage and make configuration changes to deployed services through the Repository. It is a best practice to model the fastest changing aspects of your business in this topmost layer. This makes changing in response to business requirements faster and easier. One way to think about this layer is that it should contain information about Who consumes the service, Where and When do they consume it, and How all of these aspects reflect unique capabilities, limitations and preferences of the service consumer.
Composition This layer supports the highly touted Composite Application Development strategy. This is a form of service reuse which consists of two main categories: aggregate applications and orchestrated applications. Aggregate applications are simple scenarios where
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 7
services consume one or more other services. In some cases, aggregate applications are built within a portal context. These services are usually consumed synchronously. The other type of composite application is the orchestrated service.
Orchestrated services are those in which a sequence of services is triggered, often asynchronously. These services are sometimes referred to as workflow services. These can either be constructed using workflow Run Time systems such as BPEL, or they can be implemented using a stateful service which “visits” the other services in sequence. Use of workflow Run Time systems are more advanced, and less frequently seen in commercial deployments—emerging standards like BPEL would provide reusable workflows and simple modeling tools, but it is still early days for such technology. A useful way of thinking about this layer is that it should model how your business services are delivered (process). These processes should not change as frequently as the configuration layer. Adapting business processes is often evolutionary in nature and a process of optimization.
Customization Any software development that happens “below” the service interface is software customization. This is the most expensive and time consuming style of development and it typically takes place in full programming environments such as Java or .Net. Best practices for this layer would have it that this layer should model what business services your organization delivers. Hopefully, the services your organization delivers should be reasonably stable and not changing much over time.
Model for Business Services Within these three layers forms the basis for modeling Who, Where, When, How and What services are delivered. Why you deliver your services should be self-evident. By modeling your business services using these three conceptual layers, you can build your architecture for Change Time—externalizing the fastest changing parts of your business as easily reconfigurable metadata. Service Delivery Contracts™ enable business users to implement changes directly in deployed services. This enables the direct configuration of business relationships through a browser interface. This can result in dramatically lower costs and improved
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 8
management of customer relationships. The topmost layer of the model shown above is the policy and contract layer.
HOW IT WORKS Registering providers and consumers When using X-Registry, both providers and consumers of services are registered and authorized in a central repository. The roles-based self-registration process gives IT control over who provides services and which applications consume those services.
Defining the Contract The X-Registry Services Delivery Contract contains configurable security, operations, integration and business terms that define how a service is delivered by a provider to a consuming application. After registering and authorizing service providers and consumers, a contract is established using the X-Registry Configurator. At Run Time, the X-Broker distributed broker enforces the contract terms. It is also possible to enforce contract terms through a third-party intermediary. Operations management is then done through the X-Registry console, or through third-party systems management products integrated with X-Registry and X-Broker.
Identifying the consumer application By securing services using Service Delivery Contracts, it now becomes possible to authenticate the consumer application before invoking the actual service.
Determining consumer preferences The contract determines how a service provider delivers the service to one or more service consumers based on the preferences or contract terms. A contract is usually specific to one or more consumer applications. This allows specification of different delivery or operational terms according to the preferences of the consumer applications as shown in the figure below. If no specific consumers are specified in a contract, it is called an “Open Contract”, which makes it equivalent to a policy that can be used by unidentified consumer applications.
Facilitating reuse Service Delivery Contracts™ allow the service to focus on the business logic while the delivery requirements are configured in the contract. This separation of the delivery preferences from the service itself makes it easier to reuse the service for multiple consumer applications with different delivery requirements. As an example, the same order entry service can now be used for a portal application and for a Call Center application, each one having its own delivery terms specified. The portal application may only require an LDAP authentication but the Call Center application may require Netegrity authentication as well as data transformation to match different data definitions.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 9
CONTRACT TERMS Contract terms are configurable properties defined by the services administrator or provider of the service. Contract terms are categorized in security, operations, integration and business terms.
Security Services can be easily secured by configuring the security term of the Contract. The X-Registry product provides WS-Security compliant support for authentication using a LDAP Directory Server or Microsoft Active Directory. Any other security system can be used by “plugging” it in using the X-Broker negotiator architecture. Additional security terms supported include encryption, digital signature, security alerts and logging.
Operations Operation terms include logging, monitoring and alert rules based on a set of event parameters. These events are classified as either sampling or aggregate and relate to transaction, lifecycle, performance or errors. Routing terms define how services are routed based on the content and context of the service request. Pre-defined routing templates provide easy solutions for fail-over, load balancing, SLA managing and versioning.
Integration Integration terms make it easy to connect disparate applications using services. They provide functionality typically found in EAI systems or an Enterprise System Bus (ESB), including data transformation, transport brokering and transaction integrity protection.
Business Business terms help optimize business processes and deliver visibility into business transactions. They define Content-Based Routing (CBR), business alerts and the feeding of Run Time data to Business Activity Monitoring and Billing and Metering systems. For instance, an out-of-stock response to an order request can be routed to a provisioning system for a replenishment request and the customizable ability to generate an alert to the sales department.
Extensible terms Using the X-Registry Handler Plug-in API, contract terms can be expanded either by adding new choices to existing terms or defining new terms. An example of a new choice for an existing term would be invoking a home built or a third-party security mechanism. An example of defining and adding a new term might be adding a contract term for billing which would invoke a billing system to track the usage of a service by a consumer. The new billing term could refuse further service if the consuming application reaches its credit limit.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 10
CONCLUSION webMethods’ patent-pending Service Delivery Contracts™ provides a powerful way to increase loose coupling and business agility of your IT infrastructure. In business, the fastest changing aspects often involve business relationships with customers, suppliers and partners. Because of this, it is helpful to have a flexible and configurable layer in which to model these relationships parametrically and declaratively. Business users can directly configure business and technical relationship parameters associated with a service provider consumer pair. By configuring these terms in the context of the X-Registry product, deployed services can be reconfigured to meet the unique and changing needs of each service consumer.
About the Author Miko Matsumura is Vice President of SOA Product Marketing and Technology Standards at webMethods, Inc. He also serves as chair of the SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee at Oasis and is the organizer of the SOA Link Interoperability Initiative. Miko regularly speaks throughout the world on SOA issues, as well as blogs at www.SOAcenter.com.
Prior to the recent acquisition of Infravio, Inc. by webMethods, Miko served as Vice President of Marketing and Technology Standards at Infravio, where he led marketing operations and strategic planning. Matsumura emerged as an industry thought leader at The Middleware Company, where he was a co-creator responsible for building the partner program for SOA Blueprints, the first complete vendor-neutral specification of an SOA application set, supported by BEA, Borland, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Veritas and others. At Systinet, Matsumura worked with the executive team and offshore development center on product development, product strategy, and outbound marketing, including representing the company at industry events. At Sun Microsystems, Matsumura held the position of Chief Java Evangelist, where he was a visible spokesperson for Java technologies and worked closely with Java ISVs and licensees to further the developer community. Before joining Sun, Matsumura worked at Wired Digital (acquired by Lycos) and the Well online community (acquired by Salon). He has also worked extensively with software start-up companies, including Biztone and Kalepa Networks (acquired by Semio) raising more than 12 million in capital for Java start-ups.
Matsumura is currently a limited partner with Focus Ventures and was an advisor to the Asia Java Fund, as well as start-ups TogetherSoft (acquired by Borland), Dejima (acquired by Sybase) and Kendara (acquired by Excite). Matsumura holds an MBA from San Francisco State University and a Masters Degree in Neuroscience from Yale University.
©2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved.
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ABOUT WEBMETHODS, INC. webMethods provides business process integration to the world’s largest corporations and government agencies. webMethods flagship product suite, webMethods Fabric, is the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM, delivering rapid ROI to our 1,400 customers around the globe. With webMethods, customers can take a processcentric approach to their business problems, allowing them to leverage their existing IT assets, dramatically improve business process productivity and ROI, and rapidly create competitive advantage by making their business processes work harder for their company. webMethods (NASDAQ: WEBM) is headquartered in Fairfax, VA, and has offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan.
Copyright © 2007 webMethods, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks The webMethods logo, Get There Faster, Smart Services, Smart Processes, Infravio, Infravio X-Broker, Infravio X-Registry, webMethods Infravio X-Broker and webMethods Infravio X-Registry are trademarks or registered trademarks of webMethods, Inc. Other product names used herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of webMethods or other companies. Statement of Conditions WEBMETHODS, INC. PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL WEBMETHODS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS, LOSS OF USE OR DATA INTERRUPTION OF BUSINESS, OR FOR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, EVEN IF WEBMETHODS HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES ARISING FROM ANY DEFECT OR ERROR IN THIS PUBLICATION OR IN THE WEBMETHODS SOFTWARE. webMethods, Inc. may revise this publication from time to time without notice. Some states or jurisdictions do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties in certain transactions; therefore, this statement may not apply to you. All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by copyright herein may be reproduced in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical— including photocopying, recording, taping, or storage in an information retrieval system, without prior written permission of the copyright owner. RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013 (October 1988) and FAR 52.227-19 (June 1987).
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