I am new to Nservicebus and have recently started working in it. I am stuck on a point and need input from you guys. I have 2 asp.net core web api projects and I want to use NServicebus to send messages between both of them in some scenarios.
What I have found so far that I can provide name to EndpointConfiguration, what if one of my api is deployed on 1 server and 2nd on another server, in that case how my configuration should be?
I tried to gave url instead of name in EndpointConfiguration but it gave me exception.
Thanks in advance for your help
NServiceBus endpoints communicate over some messaging infrastructure your system will be using. Endpoint names represent queues messages sent to. Messaging infrastructure is abstracted by what NServiceBus is calling a Transport. You will need to decide on the transport you'd like to use (see the options here). Once you've decided what transport your solution will use, you could have a look at the samples for that specific transports to have an idea how to set up your endpoints.
For example, if you'll decide to use Azure Service Bus as your transport, you could download and try the Send/Reply sample.
A good starting point could be the tutorials available on the documentation site here.
I am currently in the process of porting an existing application (BizTalk 2004) to a newer version of BizTalk. The current solution takes multiple types of EDI documents, modifies it if its necessary and sends it to our legacy system to be loaded and processed.
This process is developed using a combination of Receive Ports, Pipeline component, Send Ports and Maps, Schema and Message Queue Components. This solution uses 10 send & receive ports to handle various aspects of the process such as Bursting EDI into individual messages, Transforming Messages, Error handling, EDI Validation and Batching of EDI Messages. All the modification of EDI is done using Message Queue Components.
This solution does NOT use orchestration at all. I am considering implementing the current solution as a BizTalk orchestration. I have read up a bit on orchestrations and worked through few sample applications. But I am still very confused over what benefit of using orchestration, if a solution can be developed without it. I am sure I am missing something here. What additional benefit orchestration gives that the current solution does not?
Edit:...I should clarify the question...I can do this app without using Orchestration using content based routing & maps. My question is, if I am missing something by not using Orchestration?
If you can perform your task at hand with message based routing, an orchestration is overkill.
Orchestrations will help you with calling rules, or handling transactions. The following points can help you decide whether to use orchestration or not:
Is the handling Transactional
Is ordering of messages important
Are you going to process the message using business rules
Do you have to call external assemblies
A quote from "Microsoft BizTalk Server Pattern"
Orchestrations come at a considerable cost. Many of these costs manifest themselves as roundtrips to the messagebox, which means crossing a process boundary and writing to and reading from a database -the messagebox
An orchestration can potentially take twice as long for the same process. For example: A simple process of receiving a message and sending it will make 2 message hops with the messaging approach vs 4 with the orchestration.
Here are the steps for a messaging only solution
Receive the message via the adapter save it to the message box
Retrieve the message for the send port
vs:
Steps for Orchestration approach
Receive the message via the adapter and save it to the message box
Retrieve the message to start the orchestration
Do your mapping if you need to
Retrieve the item again for the send port.
Choose wisely
It sounds like you could re-implement the solution in a messaging only solution and don't need an Orchestration. If you can that's great, we prefer messaging only as they are simpler to maintain and generally more efficient. Orchestration are useful if you need to have a workflow of multiple actions, or special error handling that you can't easily do with a messaging only solution.
I've read of an ESB being used as a SOA approach. What are some other approaches?
This is a very broad question, you may want to focus is.
If you are asking regarding approaches that are instead of ESB, then you may consider using direct access to services, instead of using a service bus.
This approach is often used with a directory or lookup service like UDDI to look up service end point location.
When using an ESB, you send the message to the ESB, who 's responsible to route it to the service provider.
When using direct access the client should know in advance the address of the service provider, and he sends the message directly to him.
When using a lookup service, you first query the address of the service provider (like using DNS to lookup IP addresses), and using this address you send the message to the service provider.
Beyond addressing and routing, the ESB may provide other functions that you loose (or have to implement in other way) if you use the direct access approach.
multi cast routing - sending the request to more then one service provider
context based routing - deciding to which service provider we should send the request, based on the content of the request
central logging
central policy enforcement
load balancing \ fault tolerance
format or protocol translation
buffering and asynchronous service invocation
First.... ask yourself which SOA philosophy are you adhering to. If you are in the IBM camp, then there are 4 different products that provide ESB functionality. Each product is optimized for a different scenarios but basically each one does similar functions.
Think.... SOA == a car. IBM is one manufacturer. Different products == different type of cars for different type of drivers.
In our use of BizTalk 2009 we do a lot of EDI transmissions. We often have third party groups, VANs, that supply AS2/EDI services to our partners. Because of this I have cases where two partners use the same AS2 settings, but have different EDI settings for each partner.
Currently in these cases I have three parties. One for each partner containing EDI information, and one for the VAN which contains the shared AS2 information. Currently I have two send ports that dump the partner EDI files to a file folder. These send ports are associated with the EDI parties. I then have a receive location that listens for any files in that folder, and a send port linked directly to the receive location's port name. This send port is linked to the AS2 party, and takes care of the transmission piece.
This seems a little less then optimal to me. Are there better practices out there? If nothing else I would really like to keep the messages to the BizTalk Message Box, and not write to the local file system. Is there a way to do this?
What architecture are other people using to solve this problem with using BizTalk?
Instead of using separate send ports and associating them with a party, you have the option of using the EDI and EdiInt context properties instead. Using the context properties allows to managed all of your EDI transactions through a single send port. (Or at lease one send port per VAN)
The properties you'll be interested in are EDI.DestinationPartyName for the EDI party and EdiIntAS.AS2From for the AS2 party. Set these properties either in an orchestration or a custom pipeline component and the pipelines will use them to resolve the party and apply the correct envelopes just like they do with the associated send ports.
I've found this to be a much cleaner solution especially when you have many trading partners.
Party Resolution and Schema Determination for Outgoing EDI Messages - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259945%28v=bts.10%29.aspx
Party Resolution for Outgoing AS2 Messages - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246112%28v=bts.10%29.aspx
Is an Enterprise Service Bus (a tool that acts as a mediator, a message broker, a service enabler, schema transformation enhancer, transparent location provider, service aggregator, load balancer, monitor, and all that stuff) responsible to orchestrate services?
What about putting an automated business business process with more than thousand steps and dozens of service invocations inside your enterprise service bus?
Would you do it, or would you use a specialist in orchestration such as a BPEL engine?
Please gimme you opinion.
Yes and no. There's a thin, and sometimes indistinguishable line between orchestration and aggregation/service augmentation.
In general, if you've got any long-running or complex business process (process being the key word, although I'm going to avoid defining it) - that's best suited to BPEL.
Simple tasks, such as aggregating the results of three service calls, could and often should be done in an ESB layer.
It's not worth losing too much sleep over, though
Disclaimer: I am an IBM ESB consultant, although I'm not writing this in an official capacity.
No, an ESB's responsibility is not the orchestration of services (per se).
The ESB provides a layer of abstraction at the "software infrastructure level".
This means that an ESB is a "single logical abstract port of call for connectivity" with any service that is published on the bus.
The ESB being abstract, means that consumers of services on the bus, don't "need to know" deployment details of the service, and it is possible to expose "internally facing services" with a single document model. The ESB provides low level services (such as protocol translation and message transformation), so that internally services can communicate in a simplified fashion.
This implies some orchestration: The ESB provides orchestration of the afore mentioned low level services (e.g. when service X is called via IIOP, translate this to SOAP with Attachments. Then transform the request from whatever serialized data to an XML payload).
The orchestration you would typically avoid in an ESB is: In order to process this (insurance) sale, we first need to validate the information provided by the buyer, then we need to underwrite the risk of insuring, and finally calculate the premium that needs to be paid for the insurance, after which we need to… etc.
The steps described above are clearly a business process (which could even be interrupted… e.g. if automatic underwriting is not possible, then a human underwriter needs to further assess the risk).
Business Services (e.g. Validation, Underwriting, Premium Calculation) that make up a Business Process (e.g. Insurance Sale), which is what is typically referred to as Orchestration, is best suited to happen in a Business Process Engine and defined using a formalized Business Process Modeling Language (such as BPEL).
Also making a guess about the many steps in your process: In the above example, Validation is a (course grained) service. The validation rules themselves are internal to that service. For complex business rules (i.e. not business process), the use of a Business Rules Engine may be required.
My short quick answer is NO, that not its responsability.
I would rather let that to the BPEL or a BPM suite.
Mhh I don't know what else to add :) ... Good luck?
Now my own vision.
Regarding all the work an ESB has to do, putting service orchestration inside the main infrastructure element of your SOA is not a good idea.
Aggregate, ok! But keeping your communication channel busy with business logic will, for sure, cause a terrible impact in the ability to delivery other features.
After all, most ESBs such as as BEA Aqualogic Service have a limited support for orchestration including lack of stateful capabilities, and activities like wait (a timer) or pick (wait for some input to move on the process), split/join capabilities (already added on ALSB 3.0), and so on.
No way. Just use tools like a BPEL engine or a tool like Weblogic Integration.
Thanks.
Whenever you have two or more services that interact use service orchestrator, i.e. for composition and process control services. If you have esb expose this composition service on esb. Now if you have to compose new service that includes this composition service use orchestrator and again expose on esb.
Use esb as service delivery mechanism and web service broker and proxy. In composing a service orchestrator will use esb to reach interacting services. If these interacting services use incompatible xml schemas esb can transform/map them to common schema in runtime and route service requests based on the content, e.g. namespace.
Yes orchestration is a responsibility, in most cases, of the ESB. Or, alternatively, if you draw a line between ESB infra and orchestration infra, then you are doing so on a physical level for performance reasons, not for logical attribution of responsibility.
You have 2 choices - when, for example, an HR system receives a new employee - where do you place the business logic that says "the compliance department will need to approve and check first, and then if that's ok, the HR department will need to finalise the hire, then the accounting department will need a new entry, and then the payroll system will need updating, and if that fails, then we'll need to send an email to HR"? If all business processes are considered 'owned' by the initiating dept/application, then the overall system that is the enterprise becomes complex, with disparate orchestration systems.
The second choice is centralise the orchestration, essentially making it a logical partner of the messaging platform. If you choose to see these as separate artifacts, that is up to you, but it is equally valid to described both as ESB.
An Enterprise Service Bus should never be responsible for orchestrating services.
Orchestration implies a minimum of "smarts", specifically the ability to compensate for failed transactions. Service bus tools will often say they offer "try-catch" or something like that but the ability to run scoped componsation is the mark of a proper orchestration tool. Additionally the ability to wait, know its own state, or keep things in suspense is another indicator that you're dealing with an orchestrator and not a bus.
Speaking to 1000+ steps plus dozens of services, consider the if-then's in the process. If all the if-then statements in your 1000 steps speak only to routing with no change to the payloads then you're still in "routing" and therefore still in ESB. But if there's even one nested if-then and I start to look for different tools. Aside, if-thens that look like routing can very quickly impact business logic. Once business logic starts showing up then a better language such as BPEL or BPMN is better.
The example of an orchestra conductor is often given to describe how orchestration works, a central individual directing the musicians according to a score. Often what's left off is the idea that the conductor is not only directing, but listening as well, and if something goes wrong can compensate in a reliable, repeatable way.
For instance imagine our first conductor goes to bring in the tuba player but said tuba player has decided to go do something else. A simple pinball-style "orchestrator" will bring in the tuba section, knowing full well it isn't there, and then wait for the audience to complain later. A really savvy conductor would see the tuba gone, and immediately bring up the deeper baritone horns to compensate.