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.
Related
There's an IIB HTTP SOAP service exposed to multiple channels - the service has 4 operations and one of them is being consumed very frequently by a particular channel (less than 1 transaction per second).
Is there any way within IBM Integration Bus (broker or service level) to limit number of HTTP requests per channel (IP address) to 1 or n transactions per second?
You could implement it manually using the standard facilities of IIB, but rate-limiting is an API management feature and best implemented using out-of-the-box features of IBM API Connect. It works well with IIB, btw.
As already suggested above, this kind of logic should be done outside of IIB if you need it globaly.
On IIB level, you can configure many things, like the maximum amount of connection, but there's no logic to have this kind of pool for each users.
The best solution, in my opinion, is to use a network component specialized in this kind of logic. On my side, I've decided to implement this rule on the load balancer I have in front of my IIB server. A proxy could probably also do it.
For your specific case, if it is the only case where you need this logic, you can also consider creating different entry point for each application. If this is SOAP, and that the users currently calls /kimbertService/, you can consider having multiple SOAP Input node, with the following routes instead : /kimbertService/App1, /kimbertService/App2, /kimbertService/App3, and then you'll be sure that App1 will never block App2 ...
IIB has a feature of throttling by limiting the number of messages processed through a given message flow per second.
For example, to set the maximumRateMsgsPerSec property for a message flow included in an application, you can use the following sample code:
mqsiapplybaroverride –b BARfile -k applicationName -m sampleFlow#maximumRateMsgsPerSec=100
You can also do it through workload management policies by using the IIB web user interface.
Below is the link:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSMKHH_9.0.0/com.ibm.etools.mft.doc/bj58270_.htm
A WORK-A-ROUND SOLUTION
The ideal solution, as others have mentioned, would be to have a API management gateway sitting in front of IIB to manage your API.
Now, a work-around solution could be following:
1) Have your main service flow duplicated, making them two different message flows. These two are your back-end flows performing the same thing but on one of them you can enable throttling.
2) Build a new router IIB flow which takes HTTP requests from consumers. This flow identifies the requester and routes it to the back-end flows accordingly.
Hope this helps.
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 working on a application, which is proposed to be a set of webapps (being called agent), running on tomcat 7, configured on different nodes. I have been tasked, to make these webapps(agent) discover each other automatically. The idea is, that each webapp(say agent X) , once up, will communicate a 'request pattern' to all the other webapps. Other webapps(say agents A, B, C) in turn will store this information ('request pattern') and will use these to route any matching request to agent X using http call.
I am looking for some option where in each webapp will have some component listening on particular port, and the agent X while registering itself will send a multicast request to all the nodes on that particular port.
I think apache camel might be useful here.. but I am not sure.
It will be great if some body can tell the technical viability of this approach, or any other suggestions.
My first thought was that you could use apache httpd and the mod_proxy_loadbalancer to balance all requests over the available nodes. You can define different balancers for any kind of agents. Requests will be send to the balancer and the balancer will route it to any available node.
This is more of a messaging than a routing problem. Add Camel if you need complex routing or adapting to legacy protocols.
This looks like a classic publish and subscribe use case. You can do it with any messaging technology. Look at JMS - ActiveMQ is what Camel uses, or AMQP - I've used RabbitMQ very successfully for this, both use the "topic" paradigm for this, a quick search found this as an example: http://jmsexample.zcage.com/index2.html. Or Jabber.
Julian
What's the difference between an RPC System, like Twitter's Finagle, and an Enterprise Service Bus, like Mule? What kind of problems are each of them good at solving?
I will try to answer this as a soft explanation, rather than a technical breakdown of features:
One may say that Finagle is a asynchronous messaging library that allows services to connect to one another freely (not tightly tied to architectural system integration standards) while supporting multiple protocols.
From the Finagle website:
Finagle is a network stack for the JVM that you can use to build asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers in Java, Scala, or any JVM-hosted language. Finagle provides a rich set of protocol-independent tools.
An enterprise service bus (ESB), on the other hand, is a asynchronous messaging architecture which typically adheres to industry standards and protocols. An ESB promotes a system where message flow is controlled and routed between systems, and where servers can register their service and clients can register what messages they are interested in. The services offered by servers can be registered and versioned.
You will typically find Finagle being used somewhere between a website and backend services. But, you will typically find an ESB inside a large corporate, where it's responsible to integrating systems like finance, support, sales, etc.
Both solutions offer asynchronous messaging and buffering to various extends, but are not designed to solve the same problem. For ESB, you would probably think 'strict, enterprise', but for Finagle you would probably think 'flexible, web'.
Hope this helps
Update:
Not quite related, but if you are exploring this space, I would look at Kafka these days.
RPC and ESB are two architectural patterns. While RPC is usually a request-reply and synchronous in nature, an ESB works on the concept of messaging (simplified explanation) and of asynchronous in nature. ESB is the foundation for any SOA implementation. ESB enables loose coupling thus promoting true agility. A simplified example from implementation perspective is as follows:
A web service is a typical RPC. The consumer is tightly bound to the producer and any change in the contract on the producer side, will require changes on the consumer side.
In ESB, the service consumer doesn't invoke the service producer directly. It just puts the message in the bus and based on the rules (mediator), appropriate service producer will handle it. If the service consumer and service producer talk in different formats, ESB provides the facility to do the transformation (like formatting the zipcode as xxxxx-xxxx, splitting the name into first name and last name, etc.).
This is just simplified explanation. For more information, please check the following links:
Why do developers need an Enterprise Service Bus?
Enterprise Service Bus
Both solve completely different problems:
An ESB is an intermediation middleware that provides message transformation and routing, protocol adaptation and other value-add operations (like orchestration, guaranteed delivery, idempotent filtering...). It sits in-between your service consumers and providers and transparently (ie without any change in consumer or provider) provides its different features.
An RPC system provides client and server technologies for performing RPC operations.
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If I have a separate system with its own concept of users and presence, what is the most appropriate architecture for creating a bridge to an XMPP server network? As far as I can tell there are three primary ways:
Act as a server. This creates one touchpoint, but I fear it has implications for compatibility, and potentially creates complexity in my system for emulating a server.
Act as a clients. This seems to imply that I need one connection per user in my system, which just isn't going to scale well.
I've heard of an XMPP gateway protocol, but it's unclear if this is any better than the client solution. I also can't tell if this is standard or not.
Any suggestions or tradeoffs would be appreciated. For example, would any of these solutions require running code inside the target XMPP server (not likely something I can do).
The XMPP gateway protocol you've heard of is most likely to do with transports. A transport is a server that connects to both a XMPP server and a non-XMPP server. By running a transport, I can use my Jabber client to talk to someone using, say, MSN Messenger.
A transport typically connects once to the remote network for each JID that it sees as online. That is, it's your option 2 in reverse. This is because there is no special relationship between the transport and the non-XMPP network; the transport is simply acting as a bunch of regular clients. For this to work, XMPP clients must first register with the transport, giving login credentials for the remote network, and allowing the transport to view their presence.
The only reason this has a chance of scaling better is that there can be many transports for the same remote network. For example, my Jabber server could run a transport to MSN, another Jabber server could run another one, and so on, each one providing connections for a different subset of XMPP users. While this spreads out the load on the Jabber side, and load balancing on your system may spread out the load as well, it still requires many connections between the two systems.
In your case, because (I assume) the non-XMPP side of things is cooperating, putting a XMPP server interface on the non-XMPP server is likely your best bet. That server interface is best suited for managing the mapping between XMPP JIDs and how that JID will appear on its own network, rather than forcing XMPP users to register and so on.
In case you haven't seen these, you might find them useful:
http://www.jabber.org/jabber-for-geeks/technology-overview
http://www.xmpp.org/protocols/
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/
Hope that helps.
I too am working on a similar system.
I am going with the gateway/component route. I have looked at several options and settled with this one.
The gateway is basically a component with the specific purpose of bridging Jabber/XMPP with another network. You will have to build most of the things you take for granted when using XMPP as a client. Stuff like roster control.
There is very little help online on the actual design and building of a component. Like the above answer I found that the xmpp protocols/extensions to be of help. The main ones being:
Basic Client 2008
Basic Server 2008
Intermediate Client 2008
Intermediate Server 2008
Reading through these will show you what XEPs you will be expected to be able to handle. Ignore the stuff that will be handled by the server that your component will be attched to.
It's a shame that Djabberd has such poor documentation as their system of "everything is a module" gave the possibility of backend of the server could interface directly to the other network. I made no headway on this.
There are basically two types of server to server (s2s) connections. The first is either called a gateway or a transport, but they're the same thing. This is probably the kind you're looking for. I couldn't find specific documentation for the non-XMPP side, but how XMPP thinks about doing translations to legacy servers is at http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0100.html. The second kind really isn't explained in any additional XEPs -- it's regular XMPP s2s connections. Look for "Server-to-Server Communication" in RFC 3920 or RFC 3920bis for the latest draft update.
Since you have your own users and presence on your server, and it's not XMPP, the concepts aren't going to map completely to the XMPP model. This is where the work of the transport comes in. You have to do the translation from your model to the XMPP model. While this is some work, you do get to make all the decisions.
Which brings us right to one of the key design choices -- you need to really decide which things you are going to map to XMPP from your service and what you aren't. These feature and use case descriptions will drive the overall structure. For example, is this like a transport to talk to AOL or MSN chat services? Then you'll need a way to map their equivalent of rosters, presence, and keep session information along with logins and passwords from your local users to the remote server. This is because your transport will need to pretend to be those users and will need to login for them.
Or, maybe you're just an s2s bridge to someone else's XMPP based chess game, so you don't need a login on the remote server, and can just act similarly to an email server and pass the information back and forth. (With normal s2s connections the only session that would be stored would be SASL authentication used with the remote server, but at the user level s2s just maintains the connection, and not the login session.)
Other factors are scalability and modularity on your end. You nailed some of the scalability concerns. Take a look at putting in multiple transports to balance the load. For modularity, see where you want to make decisions about what to do with each packet or action. For example, how do you handle and keep track of subscription data? You can put it on your transport, but then that makes using multiple transports harder. Or if you make that decision closer to your core server you can have simpler transports and use some common code if you need to talk to services other than XMPP. The trade off is a more complex core server with more vulnerability potential.
What architecture you should use depends on the non-XMPP system.
Do you operate the non-XMPP system? If yes, you should find a way to add an XMPP-S2S interface to that system, in other words, make it act as an XMPP server. AOL is using this approach for AIM. Unfortunately, they have restricted their gateway to GoogleTalk.
You don't operate the non-XMPP system but it has a federation interface that you can use - i. e. your gateway can talk to the other system as a server and has a namespace of its own. In this case, you can build a gateway that acts as a federated server on both sides. For I don't know of any example of a gateway that uses this approach but you could use it if you want to build a public XMPP-to-SIP bridge.
If the non-XMPP system doesn't give you a federation interface, then you have no other option but acting as a bunch of clients. In the XMPP world, this is called a "transport". The differences between a transport and a normal server are basically:
the JIDs of the transport are mapped from another system (e.g. john.doe\40example.net#msngateway.example.org - really ugly!)
XMPP users who want to use the transport need to create an account on the non-XMPP system and give the login credentials of that account to the transport service. The XMPP protocol even has a protocol extension that allows XMPP users to do transport registrations in-band.
One other approach is to work with your XMPP server vendor. Most have internal APIs that make injecting presence possible from third party applications. For example, Jabber XCP provides an API for this that's really easy to use.
(Disclosure: I work for Jabber, Inc, the company behind Jabber XCP)