Web Services Versioning

Web services versioning is the ability to provide consumers with uninterrupted service while upgrading a Web service or sets of shared services. Service upgrades occur regularly – server hardware is upgraded, application server platforms are revised, and services change over time to accommodate new functional requirements or to fix bugs. In a 24x7 service network, where consumers of shared services are often unrelated, it is imperative to avoid any dependencies between service consumers and service providers. In a production environment of shared services it is important that:

• The migration of users to a new service can be performed smoothly, without any effort forced on to the consumer. SOAPstation supports this by transparently routing messages to the appropriate service behind the scenes and performing any message transformation to ensure compatibility.
• Dependencies between users be eliminated. In situations where a set of service consumers cannot be migrated to a new service (say in the case of a service upgrade), it is critical that their delays don't impact unrelated service consumers and others desiring to migrate to a new version.
• Operations have the ability to quickly remove old services from production. Removing old, outdated services from production is a cost savings in many cases and reduces the burden on operations to support multiple, redundant sets of services. SOAPstation achieves this by transparently routing and transforming messages away from older versions – eliminating the dependency upon client-side code changes for removing an older system from operation.

SOAPstation Deployment

The minimum requirement for the approach outlined above involves one SOAPstation instance, however we recommend a cluster of two SOAPstations for resiliency. SOAPstations can be clustered so that if one system fails, the other carries the total load without any service interruption at all.

Implementation could take the form of the following:

Running an unmanaged enterprise service network is fraught with escalating difficulty and expense. Web services versioning with Actional SOAPstation can dramatically ease migrations to enterprise-wide Web services.

Summary

Both provisioning and versioning capabilities often come into play after initial service deployments. Having SOAPstation in place early will enable development and operations to react more quickly and effectively to change than they would otherwise.

For More Information

Discover the details of Web services versioning – and other topics concerning network change: download the free white paper, SOA Primer: Comprehensive Runtime Governance from Actional