ISC Capabilities: The Service Registry

Yesterday's ISC Capability Map included two “registry-like” constructs, one specialized for services (Service Registry) and the other generalized for managing and monitoring resources within the datacenter (CMDB). A Service Registry is designed to store and manage information related to service composition, management and execution. The ISC Service Registry incorporates support for UDDI but extends UDDI’s simple tModel to include metadata such as availability, security and usage policies, bindings, key performance indicators (KPIs), transport options, service levels, chargebacks, tracing, event logging, user feedback ratings and more.

The Service Registry is accessed at design time, build time and runtime.

During design time, developers and system administrators can search for a service based upon capabilities, service levels, chargebacks and more.

During build time, service security and aggregation policies are validated while service usage indicators are updated to track the number of consumers that may be using the service (usage indicators are confirmed once a service consumer is deployed into a production environment). The service developer uses these usage indicators to determine the breadth of service consumption, providing better insight into consumer (e.g. analyzing possible breaking changes when updating a previously deployed service).

During runtime,the Service Registry provides additional metadata to log service calls based upon KPIs. Services will typically provide two levels of KPIs – one for the service itself (defined by the service developer) and one for consumption of the service (defined by the service consumer). A consumer’s visibility into service-level KPIs will depend upon the service’s deployment policies. The Service Registry also indicates which data warehouse(s) should be used to archive call logs and KPIs for non-repudiation and additional data mining needs.

The Service Registry is itself a highly scalable, highly available resource. A Service Registry is not designed to manage or monitor datacenter resources – it is a special purpose registry designed exclusively for tracking information about services. On the other hand, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is designed to manage and maintain datacenter resources (including the Service Registry itself).

Look for a short entry about the CMDB tomorrow.