What is the difference between Daas Data as Service and EAI Enterprise Application Integration ?
I understand that EAI is a framework designed to overcome the complexities of Enterprise Software integration (between ERP, SCM, CRM etc..) using ESB Enterprise Service Bus,
Would like to know where DAAS fits in the picture ?
Would also like to understand the difference between EAI and SOA
Data as a Service (DaaS) gives access to data or content collected and provided by some external service provider. Examples include post area codes, geospatial data, customer address data, market prices, economic trends, exchange rates, stock quotes and bank codes.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a general term which describes that applications in a (big) company are connected via a centralized facility rather than via a variety of proprietary point-to-point interfaces. To access a DaaS service, an application could use an EAI platform.
Applications can benefit from standardized EAI integration functions (connectivity, routing, data transformation, logging, monitoring, security, error handling ...) and do not have to implement these in themselves. Support and operation might also be more economic compared to point-to-point integration.
SOA as Service-oriented Architecture is a special architecture for integration. Rather than providing and consuming services, one could also send and receive messages or use a database as central information hub.
Related
Is it advicible to build the MSA based services on Oracle SOA or any other ESB suite for that matter? Is there any advantage or disadvantage?
If I am using Java, Spring and JPA over a message queue - say - RabbitMQ, I can achieve it in a more controlled environment with less recurring expenses. Of course will end up mixing tools like Drools or JBPM or similar to achieve things that may be OOTB (Out of the box) in the SOA Or ESB Suite. But scaling a specific service without paying licence fee for an additional environment should certainly be a good catch right?
Microservices architecture pattern applies to development of backend systems/services, whereas ESB (e.g. Oracle SOA Suite) is intended as an intermediary layer between consumers and backend services. Backend services contain rich application logic, whereas ESB services provide only intermediary functions like routing, transformation, orchestration etc.
ESB is not intended for rich application logic, though it's possible to do that.
Using ESB (e.g. Oracle SOA Suite) to host microservices is achievable, but you will get a big overhead comparing to limited functions and scalability. If you are looking for centralized API management (tracing, security etc.), you can put an API gateway into your architecture instead of full scale ESB.
I study SOA and webservices for a science paper. My state of knowledge is, that every SOA architcture needs a service broker.
Webservices are concrete implementations of a SOA, so do they have a service broker after? For example I create a webservice in asp.net which returns "hallo world" By Creating it, do I create a service broker too?
Don't let fool you by answers which are copy paste from Wikipedia :-)
Webservices are concrete implementations of a SOA
This assumption/statement is wrong. At least there is no direct relationship between SOA and webservices. SOA is an architectural paradigm where a webservice is a concrete technology (stack) based on WSDL and its result, the SOAP-protocol. Nothing more. Webservices may help to establish loosely coupled service landscape, which the SOA paradigm expects. But you could also build up a SOA landscape with other technology stacks (self-written hacks, RMI, even based on REST for instance).
Repository
The thing is: When you start building up your SOA-landscape, you (or others) will code services (i.e. webservices) where your service will have a technical contract (WSDL, WADL, ..) as a base for the implementation. Your clients will ask for it and you want it to store somewhere. This somewhere is usually a service repository. You could develop your own one, use the UDDI-standard or just buy one of products by the big vendors (IBM, TIBCO, Oracle etc).
Broker
A message broker within the SOA context is some piece of software, which supports the decoupling of the connected partner systems. Commonly it's called ESB (enterprise service bus). Also one of the goals of the SOA paradigm is, that the services can be used by anyone (reusability). Therefore you don't want to connect your services by P2P-connections (aka spaghetti architecture) - just imagine that one of the service participants changes it's hardware/IP: this would be a nightmare for all the connected partner systems. That's why the ESB was invented which acts between the service consumer and the service provider.
Typically, these ESB-products support a lot of technologies or -stacks/APIs like HTTP, JMS, REST etc.
Source: I work with a self-claimed SOA landscape and thousands of different (web-)services for a big company for a long time now.
A Web service is a set of related application functions that can be programmatically invoked over the Internet. Businesses can dynamically mix and match Web services to perform complex transactions with minimal programming. Web services allow buyers and sellers all over the world to discover each other, connect dynamically, and execute transactions in real time with minimal human interaction.
Web services are self-contained, self-describing modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.
A network component in a Web Services architecture can play one or
more fundamental roles: service provider, service broker, and service
client.
Service brokers register and categorize published services and provide search services. For example, UDDI acts as a service broker for WSDL-described Web services.
I've been thinking about this idea and wanted to know if it's been implemented commercially. Just like there are (external) domain-specific programming languages (where instead of the int's and string's and classes you have business-specific entities and functions that are the primitive types in the language syntax/semantics), is there such a thing as a domain-specific enterprise service bus where instead of routing, orchestrating, and integrating different systems through standard protocols (SOAP/HTTP, JMS, JDBC...etc), you're actually working at more abstract layer of integrating commercial systems (in a specific industry) via their communication protocols? I'm wondering if this pattern has been used as a product for integrating different systems (of different domain standards) within a specific industry (e.g. healthcare, automotive).
Example, in healthcare. You have a central bus that commercial healthcare applications plug into and communicate to each other, get orchestrated, monitored through protocols like HL7, HIE, CCD...etc where the activities, integration, and workflows done through the bus are authored by business analysts (instead of IT staff), example: health quality officers at a hospital, clinical analysts, physicians....etc
Yes, there are many such custonized ESBs, e.g.
BridgeLink
by ISGN is a product for Real Estate Mortgage Domain.
JBoss ESB allows for the customization of transports. There is also the Redhat supported version in SOA-P
IBM has had that for years (and others like Microsoft and Oracle). It's called IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender product http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27008337. They have it for several of industries.
In healthcare, this type of integration middleware is called Interface engine.
This is because this type of products are traditionally used by health IT vendors to expose standard-oriented interfaces such as HL7 messaing interfaces.
Consider a EHR vendor, who does not have HL7 expert to implement the interfaces but still wants to integrate with other systems using HL7 or IHE profiles. With an interface engine, along with the expertise provided by their service, the vendor can convert their database interface or SOAP interfaces into standard HL7 interfaces easily.
The market has several players, such as Corepoint, Ensemble, Mirth, etc.
However, these tools are quite focused on the technical level issues, including connecting endpoints, transforming data formats, and routing messages between interfaces, as what you can expect from an ESB. I don't think they are meant to be used by business analysts.
I am curious if it even makes consider BizTalk for the implementation of a pub/sub messaging architecture (basically what you can do with NServiceBus or MassTransit is all I really need). My manager tends to want to stick with frameworks provided directly from Microsoft and so as part of my due diligence as to which one to use I need to give a good set of pro/cons for both sides. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
One of the major cons of a Broker is that it is very difficult to version and upgrade. You would have to stop the flow of messages to upgrade a particular endpoint(s). A Service Bus allows endpoints to be autonomous and be upgraded independently.
Then there is a difference in terms of scale. With a Broker the tendency is to scale those up(vertical) versus a Service Bus which is built for scaling out(horizontal). You would also have to make the Broker highly available through some sort of HA setup(clustering usually). This combined with the cost of software to do so can become pretty cost prohibitive.
NSB in particular will be offering a paid support model so if your manager is nervous about not having someone on the other end of the line when something goes wrong, you can buy into support.
Biztalk is a broker and is more suited for EAI within the boundaries of different business services. A servicebus is fundamentally different. A comparison can be found here:
http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/architecture/nservicebus-and-biztalk
If you can share some of your requirements I might be able to give some more guidance.
It's important to note that BizTalk is a server product for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI -- as Andreas mentioned). It's more involved and complicated than a framework.
Microsoft does have the Enterprise Service Bus Toolkit available to use within BizTalk, so that you can call your BizTalk environment your ESB. What they consider "ESB" may not be what you consider ESB. You can take a look at their ESB Toolkit page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/dd876606.aspx), but it includes things like:
Dynamic (i.e., at run-time) message
transformation and translation.
Message routing can be content-based, itinerary-based, or context-based, and determined at run-time.
Of course, the publish-subscribe pattern is not the same thing as using a service bus.
BizTalk does do pub-sub well, whether or not you use the ESB Toolkit. It's extremely simple to publish a single message to the BizTalk "Message Box", and have the message routed to any and all subscribers. The pub-sub solution means that BizTalk acts as a broker, but this helps guarantee that messages do not get missed, and all messages are tracked. A BizTalk pub-sub solution has built-in extensibility points that allow us to add, change, or remove endpoints without impacting the rest of the solution.
All that being said, your requirements may not dictate extensive message reliability, monitoring, and tracking, so it could be that BizTalk is not the best fit for you. It is a large investment, and since the product can do so many different things all at once, it can be daunting at a first glance.
A new book was just published call Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform, which covers much of this. One of that book's authors, Richard Seroter, also published SOA Patterns with BIzTalk Server 2009, which would be essential reading if you do decide to go with BizTalk for your company.
I'm with Andreas on this - BizTalk is generally more suited to 'value add' integration and business process management, rather than ESB type activity. BizTalk is good at:
BPEL
Long Running / Compensated Transactions
EAI
Brokering / Mapping
Protocol changes (MQ to WCF, Flat File to SAP etc)
EDI, RFID
However, efforts have been made to use BizTalk as a service bus, notably the ESB Toolkit
I am looking into architectural patterns, Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) precisely. Upon reading this article Enterprise Integration, and with little to no experience I am wondering if BizTalk has is a ESB or is it just a EAI (Hub/Spokes or Bus)?
I found this NServiceBus and Biztalk, describing BizTalk as a central message broker.
Taking other ESB frameworks into account (NServiceBus and Rhino Service Bus). These frameworks have no central point to process messages.
Is Biztalk a EAI rather than an ESB?
Many thanks
BizTalk is punted by Microsoft as having ESB capabilities - see the BTS ESB toolkit
However, the term 'ESB' covers a very broad field, and there is a lot of subjectivity about an exact definition of an ESB. IMHO there are weak points in BizTalk's claim to be comprehensive as an ESB (in a > 2010 definition of the term).
BTS originated in the Hub-and-Spoke EAI era, before ESB became widespread.
BTS is more suited toward asynchronous processes than synchronous processes - latencies will vary depending on load on the system, throttling state, etc.
BTS is cumbersome when it comes to ease of versioning of services and schemas (new deployment is needed)
BTS is cumbersome when it comes to management of MANY services (e.g. Using BizTalk as a facade for all 5000 of your corporate SOA / Web Services will be painful)
FWIW we have found BTS a good fit for:
all of our synchronous and asynchronous EAI (i.e. formalized integration contracts between major LOB systems, and with trading partners), and the large number of adapters assists with integrating a wide number of protocols.
For Business Process and Business Monitoring capabilities
Addressing transactional and delivery reliablity - Biztalk has capability to retry, tracking and resumption of Suspended messages, which is useful over unreliable networks or when it comes to integration with unreliable systems.
Update, with some further comparative experiences
BTS is very centralised - ultimately, even a multi-server BizTalk cluster / group is dependent on Sql-Server. Queue based ESB products tend to be more decentralised (logically and physically), so loss of a few endpoint or queue servers should not pull the whole enterprise down.
Many queue based ESB's are built on open source technologies, with an eye on avoiding single vendor lock-in
Many contemporary ESB's seem to take a commodity-computing approach to scale out. Scaling out with products like BizTalk can become expensive.
On the plus side, the monitoring and administration capabilities of commercial offerings like BTS should not be underestimated - make sure any ESB you are considering has adequate auditing, instrumenting, retry, and diagnostic (WMI / SNMP / SCOM etc) capabilities - you'll need a dashboard to monitor the health of your bus, and there is nothing worse than not knowing where a message went. Here, centralisation administration and diagnosis is a plus.
BizTalk is a messaging and workflow orchestration platform, on which you can build ESB behaviours and capabilities. To make this easier, and standardise ESB implementation on BizTalk, Microsoft released the BizTalk ESB Toolkit - a set of guidelines, patterns and code.
The concepts of EAI and BPM have been around for a while, so there are many companies that have leveraged BizTalk to create solutions to these problems. Companies that host a full ESB on BizTalk server are far fewer, and adoption has certainly slowed in the advent of WCF/WF/NServiceBus and, of course, Azure Service Bus.
So in summary, BizTalk out of the box is nether EAI or ESB, but can do both with a number of developers applied to the problem.
By "EAI or ESB" I'm assuming you wanted to know if BizTalk follows the Hub&Spoke or the Bus architecture.
From an architecture patterns perspective, integration solutions roughly fall under one of the two patterns-
The Hub and spoke:
This involves a centralized message broker sending out messages to various receivers, while all the senders send their messages only to this broker.
Thus neither the senders nor the receivers need to be aware of each other.
This is typically what many people refer to as EAI (although it is absolutely possible to implement an EAI solution that follows the BUS pattern).
Solutions following this pattern are easy to develop and administer. All the routing logic is centrally managed at one place - in the hub.
But as you would have guessed, this has a glaring drawback - single point of failure. If the hub crashes everything comes to a halt. Also, this model doesn't scale very well.
BUS:
Enterprise Integration solutions developed around this pattern are generally referred to as ESB. There is no intelligent central authority here. All senders publish their messages on the bus. The receivers need to be intelligent enough to determine which messages are intended for them and take them off the bus.
Thus the senders and the receivers need only be aware of the bus. But here the routing logic is spread across the receivers so there is no single point of failure. Also this model is highly scalable. However such solutions are quite complex and difficult to administer.
Coming to the question which pattern does BizTalk follow- it is a hybrid of both these patterns.
the Hub-like appearance is very obvious with its centralized Messaging Engine, and a central MessageBox database. This gives one the simplicity and ease of administration which is typical of the hub approach.
But if you look at the BizTalk architecture, one can have a Host with its Host Instances spread across multiple servers. It is also possible to have the different BizTalk databases like MessageBox, Tracking, Ent SSO etc. configured on different servers. This makes BizTalk solutions more scalable and tolerant to faults than the run-of-the-mill hub implementations - which is a behavior usually attributed to the bus approach.
Hope this answers your question.
BizTalk is certainly an ESB. EAI is more of a loose concept - BizTalk can certainly be deployed to support EAI, and it can also do a lot more.
BizTalk is more than an ESB but certainly fits the bill. This link is a little old, but answers your exact question.
EDIT: Here is a more-recent MS link that gets into specifics of implementation.
BizTalk can be used as both EAI and ESB.
As for ESB, the BizTalk server architecture is publish-subscribed, a single message can be published to the messagebox which acts as the messaging backbone bus. That message can be received by one or more destination systems that are subscribed to that message. Of course there more capabilities and features that you can get by using BizTalk server like the mapper tool and the use of pipeline components for example.
For use as EAI, BizTalk offers you orchestrations that manage the business logic, LOB(Line of business) adatpers to connect to systems(also legacy), mapper tool, rules engine, and a lot of what you need in order to integrate the different systems in or outside your company.
Absolutely! Biztalk comes from an EIS background, which makes perfect sense for ESB as an infrastructure backplane for service-oriented architectures that span hybrid technical platforms.
At a previous company we chose Biztalk in preference to the IBM ESB product for reasons of functionality and lower cost.
It is Microsoft, so you get what you pay for, but still well worth looking into.
Biztalk Server withot "ESB Toolkit" Is not an ESB.
Because of the following:
Is a contract first, need to build you message types first.
Need to Plan the whole scenario first to minimize the impact of changes.
Changes requires Deployment which increases downtime.
Regarding to your qustion, Yes BizTalk Server is EAI Product
I agree with most of what's said here. It's a stretch to pitch BizTalk as an all inclusive EBS solution even with the EBS toolkit.
To address a couple points made here ...
•BTS is more suited toward asynchronous processes than synchronous
processes - latencies will vary depending on load on the system,
throttling state, etc.
BizTalk hosts with unchanged defaults are not ideal for a low latency. But those hosts are meant to be tuned. Out of the box configuration is not suitable for any situation where throughput is needed. In my experiences of walking into an organization where BizTalk has been shunned there is always an untuned single host setup sitting in the middle of it. It is somewhat analogous to making tables in a dbms with no indexes, getting performance issues and saying the dbms itself sucks.
•BTS is cumbersome when it comes to ease of versioning of services and
schemas (new deployment is needed)
Like with any development platform you need to have a deployment strategy. If schemas have version in the namespace you do not need to redeploy anything. A new version maybe deployed without taking anything down.
As far as the service endpoints are concerned BizTalk can host web services without the use of IIS (BizTalk can use HTTP.SYS to host just as IIS does). To host an inprocess service in BizTalk is merely a matter of importing a binding which can be done without stopping anything in BizTalk. In those end points you can implement versioning as well (like http:.../thing/v1, http:.../thing/v2, etc.).
Anyway ~5 years have passed I'm sure you have hit a conclusion before now :)
BizTalk can do both ESB and EAI, depends how you design your biztalk applications.