Web Services Proxy

Find out how a Web Services proxy-based approach can be used to manage your Web services and give you visibility into, and control over, business processes running on your network. Topics such as Web services security are introduced as well.

Web Services Proxy Approach Using Actional SOAPstation

Actional SOAPstation is a Web services management proxy that brokers the interactions between applications providing Web services and the systems that build on (consume) them. Opting for a proxy-based approach enables organizations to achieve the desired flexibility in their deployment of services while minimizing the impact of change to their applications. Additionally, an organization might choose this approach if they wish to monitor services beyond their domain of control, such as an external services provided by a third party.

Often, performance and operations issues emanate from changes to configurations within the network of shared services. The ability to manage this change and insulate others from its impact is critical to maintaining a high availability of shared services within the network.

With a proxy-based approach, organizations benefit through the ability to:

• Quickly and consistently gain Business Process Visibility into how services are being used and by whom without additional coding or logging of applications
• Provision for managed Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Easily integrate security into Web services applications without tight (brittle) coupling between security policies and application development
• Readily adapt to change with respect to how services are exposed and shared
• Easily remove interdependencies between user communities of a service. As services change over time, communities of users can proceed with change at a pace that makes sense for their business
• Provision services differently for each community of users
• Easily version Web services and roll new features into production

Summary: SOAPstation Gets the Job Done

Actional SOAPstation provides a broad range of capabilities to enable these Web services proxy benefits, including:

• Definition and enforcement, monitoring, alerting and auditing of Web services policies
• End-to-end safety
• SOA lifecycle management (adapting to change)
• Configuration roll-backs
• Integration with UDDI
• Integration with other management platforms
• Other security options
• Back-end monitoring and re-routing upon failure
• Clustering of SOAPstation for scaleability / performance

For More Information

Understand the operation and benefits of the proxy-based approach to Web services management: read the free white paper, Aligning IT and Business Goals with Business Process Visibility