Service Oriented Infrastructure

The term Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is widely used in the context of implementing the messaging capabilities of a service oriented infrastructure. An ESB is one of many building blocks that make up a comprehensive service oriented infrastructure. The messaging capabilities required in a service oriented infrastructure extend the functions of traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) to include first class support for Web Service standards and integration with other service infrastructure components such as policy management, metadata registry, and operational and business monitoring frameworks. Given the heterogeneous nature of most enterprise infrastructures and the significant investments already made in EAI and MOM assets, it is also important that your ESB enhance your ability to leverage those existing assets in a service oriented world.

The Managed Services Engine (MSE) is one approach to facilitating Enterprise SOA through service virtualization. Built upon the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Microsoft Server Platform, the MSE was developed by Microsoft Services as we helped customers address the challenges of SOA in the enterprise.

The MSE fully enables service virtualization through a Service Repository, which helps organizations deploy services faster, coordinate change management, and maximize the reuse of various service elements. In doing so, the MSE provides the ability to support versioning, abstraction, management, routing, and runtime policy enforcement for Services.

As Web services gain acceptance as a means to connect disparate software applications and expose information in a standardized way, organizations of all sizes face the challenge of organizing and managing these services both behind and beyond the corporate firewall. Enterprise UDDI Services in Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 provides a reliable, interoperable, scalable solution to this challenge. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) is a flexible yet structured solution that provides a foundational description and discovery infrastructure for Web services. For enterprise architects and application development managers, UDDI Services maximizes the visibility of existing code and applications and helps to realize the vision of reusing code and development resources. For IT professionals, UDDI Services provides a powerful tool that can help manage Web services across an organization.