Introduction to Web Application Services
Is This for You? The Web application services document set is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals who are responsible for the planning, design, deployment, and operations of Web application services in enterprise environments. The readers of this document set are expected to have an understanding of its technical details; however, service-level expertise is not needed to follow the enterprise-level discussions and to understand the decisions that are made.
On This Page
 | Introduction |
| Blueprint |
| Planning Guide |
| Build Guide |
| Operations Guide |
Introduction
Organizations with varying responsibilities and business functions are increasingly facing the need to provide Web-based services for users within the enterprise, other data centers, and the outside world. To provide these services, they need to deploy Web server-based architectures that are highly available, secure, and scalable. In addition, such architectures should lend themselves to monitoring and auditing, as well as the ability to absorb changes without significantly affecting the services they provide. Web application services provide an organization with a mechanism for offering an application interface on the Web. This interface may be for external customers, as is the case for Internet-based service organizations, or for internal Web applications that share information and workflow among various teams or with partners. The following scenarios are typical in that they represent the kinds of functionality that many of today's organizations need to provide. The list, though far from complete, provides an insight into the amalgamation of Web-based technologies along with the mode and type of services offered by an organization:
| • | E-Commerce application (Internet Business) |
| • | Organization Web presence |
| • | Intranet Web sites |
| • | Offline sales support |
| • | Partner interface |
| • | Custom applications |
These scenarios call for Web-centric solutions that offer services with different levels of availability, security, scalability, and performance. In addition to having these characteristics, the environment should be cost-effective, adaptable to change, and a good fit with the organization’s vision and business objectives. This section provides links to reference information that is helpful in understanding the Web application service design process:
Blueprint
This blueprint provided information about the Web application service design process for an enterprise-class organization with different types of data centers. It analyzed various design choices for Web application services and tried to map them to existing available sets of technologies. It also evaluated different technologies for providing availability, security, scalability, and manageability for different types of Web application services.
Planning Guide
This guide briefly described the Web application services design for the CDC and SBO scenarios. It provided a description of the design choices considered during the design process, the options chosen, and the reasons for choosing the options. This guide helps the reader understand how to use the design guidance provided in the Web Application Services Blueprint to formulate a complete and tested instantiation of a Web application solution in the CDC and SBO scenarios of the Contoso business case study defined in the Introduction to Windows Server System Reference Architecture document.
Build Guide
The WSSRA Web application servers were designed to provide a secure base platform for deploying Web applications. While IIS servers were relatively simple to deploy, careless implementation can lead to security and availability problems. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all the outlined steps in this guide be completed on each IIS server. This guide also provided details on the testing that was carried out for Web application services in WSSRA. The test methodology and the test tools used were discussed, along with details about setting up the tools and using them for data analysis after the tests.
Operations Guide
This guide helps the readers understand the extent of operations guidance that is available for the Web application services discussed in WSSRA. This guidance has been tested in a WSSRA environment and the project team deferred to this guidance as the authoritative source of operations content.