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.
Related
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.
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.
they have many common features. but how the difference?
MOM allow asynchronous while SOA does not, this is the only difference?
SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, is an architecture that defines how to structure access to business information between different applications. In a nutshell, usually, one application needs something done with a piece of information (may it be an orderfile or anything else) that application has a need. Another application may be able to do the corresponding processing of that piece of information, hence it has a capability. The first application then Consumes the Service of the second application, which Provides the Service (no matter the underlying technology, which can be anything such as JMS, HTTP/SOAP, HTTP/REST, EMail, FTP, etc.). To make this work, a Contract between the first application and the Service has to be defined which clears such things out as Message Format (XSD or similar), Protocol (HTTP/SOAP? JMS?) etc.
MOM, Message Oriented Middleware, on the other hand is just a family of software/middleware platforms. They are actual implementations, and not a high-level concept like SOA. They can be used to implement a SOA architecture, an Event Driven architecture or other architectures. Usually, MOM enriches a set of applications with asynchronous messaging where a MOM server stores and forwards the messages. Often things such as transactions, guranteed delivery, fail-over, loose coupling and load balancing are built into MOM implementations. Examples of MOM are IBM WebSphere MQ, Apache ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, JBoss HornetQ, etc.
Message oriented middleware (MOM) is a type of technology where as SOA is a type of architecture. Even though a lot of people think about web-service when they talk about SOA, you can use MOM to implement it as well (in fact in many cases that's the better option)
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.
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.