CCR2 talks to Sunil Murthy about realizing the potential of SOA with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS
from CCR2, Issue 01 - 2007
 The hundreds or thousands of services in a service oriented architecture (SOA) require management and governance to realize the benefits of SOA, including service reuse and business flexibility. Product manager Sunil Murthy talks to CCR2’s Carrine Greason about the enterprise-strength IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS, a store for valuable metadata for exposing services and governing their lifecycle. |
CCR2: How can CCR2 readers use IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS to master service management and governance?
Sunil Murthy: Organizations at any stage of SOA adoption need to handle services metadata effectively. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides optimized storage of service metadata with a user-friendly interface. Such a store can provide invaluable data to help IT keep tabs on services; reveal their owners, impact, interdependencies and performance; and expose information that messaging systems and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) can use to dynamically select services.
We’ve seen a huge demand for a service registry and repository from z/OS customers who want to reuse years of CICS transactions and make mainframe-based services available throughout the enterprise and with business partners.
CCR2: Tell us more about the core capabilities of a service registry and repository.
SM: Built from the ground up specifically for SOA, a service registry and repository is a place to keep details about all your services – irrespective of how they were written, where they are located, or how they are accessed. The repository stores and links the metadata from various sources and provides four main functions: 1) it’s a centralized location to publish and find service metadata to promote reuse of services; 2) it provides enriched connectivity with dynamic end-point selection for business flexibility; 3) it helps you manage metadata and understand the impact of changes to services; and 4) it enables service governance.
CCR2: In any enterprise, you need a standard way to share information about services, otherwise you’d miss opportunities to reuse them, and your SOA could balloon with redundant services that would add to IT overhead, right?
SM: Yes, service reuse has direct business benefit – both lower costs and faster time to market. Having a standard way to publish and find service information provides visibility into your service assets. We find that the success of service reuse is directly associated with how easily the metadata is accessible to SOA participants. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides both a Web browser-based user interface and Eclipse plug-in, so you can conveniently access the data at any stage of the service life cycle – model, assemble, deploy and manage.
Providing this view and encouraging reuse is the crux of SOA. One classic example is the CICS transaction, which can be published as a Web service and made visible across your SOA deployment through the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. That gives you a clean way to share your proven CICS transactions. You may also have mainframe assets managed by IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer; these can be packaged as services and published in the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, too.
CCR2: Today’s mainframe transactions may be reused long into the future as SOA-based services. Earlier you mentioned enriched connectivity with dynamic end-point selection as providing business flexibility – how can CCR2 readers achieve more flexible connectivity?
SM: SOA connectivity using ESBs is enriched with dynamic lookup and selection of a service, based on information stored as service metadata in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. For example, when IBM WebSphere Message Broker requests a service, summarized performance information in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provided by IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for SOA can lead Message Broker to choose an alternate service that has been delivering higher levels of response and availability.
As another example, WebSphere Message Broker can use customer criteria to query service metadata in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. With that information, it can select services to make available to a particular customer, such as a lower-interest loan or other premium service. You can edit metadata in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to swap the set of services presented to such customers when business needs change – without rewriting static logic.
CCR2: Bringing performance information into service selection can help IT operations maintain service levels, and giving business managers a flexible way to change their customer offerings can free up IT resources. You also mentioned metadata management as one of the capabilities of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. How does that work?
SM: There is a lot of metadata associated with services; you have a multiple files generated as part of service information – Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and XML files, Web Services Policy (WS-Policy) attachments, and more. Customers often have to classify and store a couple of versions of these documents as services evolve, plus information about when the service was last changed and who changed it. All this data storage needs to be optimized, because when WebSphere Message Broker looks for these service documents, you don’t want it to churn – you want it to quickly find the information it needs. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository helps you manage this metadata and return the information to the requestor efficiently.
Another part of service management is impact analysis: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository gives complete visibility into service relationships, so you can understand the impact of adding, changing or deleting service information. Impact analysis also goes further: Because you can see all the subscribers of a service, you can understand how changing the service would affect a subscriber, such as message broker. Lack of such powerful impact analysis capabilities before changing a service could jeopardize your loosely-coupled architecture and bring SOA interactions to a grinding halt. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has the information ready for you at all times.
CCR2: You’ve talked about how WebSphere Service Registry and Repository can help CCR2 readers manage and leverage their service metadata. That brings us to the topic of governance – implementing a standard process for keeping track of services in your enterprise. How can WebSphere Service Registry and Repository help?
SM: You need tools to enforce discipline if you are going to have an optimized SOA. One of the primary reasons to introduce a service registry and repository is to have well-defined and agreed upon processes for introducing a new service and reusing the service information across SOA. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository’s role-based access – such as for an administrator, developer, architect or analyst -- contributes to proper SOA governance.
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides a life-cycle approach for service governance with best practices for transitioning from one state to another. As a service moves through design, deployment, production, management and retirement, these stages need to be communicated to the other participants in an SOA. For example, with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, governance processes promote a service from testing to production, so the IT operations team can prepare for service availability. Governance processes can also determine when the service is no longer needed, enabling you to retire it without affecting subscribers.
CCR2: You talked about ITCAM for SOA, WebSphere Message Broker and other IBM solutions working with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. How does this solution fit into IBM’s SOA portfolio?
SM: While you are designing and developing your SOA, you can tap into WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with any Eclipse-based tool, including IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, IBM Rational Software Architect, and IBM WebSphere Integration Developer. z/OS customers can publish and find WSDL files using IBM CICS SupportPac CAIN. The CICS transaction, as well as a batch utility, can be used to publish service description documents and metadata from IBM CICS Transaction Server.
In addition, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is geared for dynamic runtime decisions, so it can provide information to IBM WebSphere ESB, IBM WebSphere Process Server and IBM WebSphere Message Broker. It can also connect to Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA to drill down for availability metrics or to gather information for runtime decisions. It connects to the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for IT Service Management. And it provides critical service metadata for the IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric, which enables dynamic business service composition and delivery based on business context.
While the products I’ve mentioned so far are from IBM, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository also offers a generic client for the Microsoft .NET environment, and a set of APIs that can be leveraged by any third-party product, such as other registries, ESBs and runtimes. IBM’s leadership in evolving industry standards contributes to our cross-vendor integration capability.
CCR2: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS sounds like a solution that will help IBM System z customers realize the full benefits of SOA adoption. What was the development process like?
SM: Although this is the first version to become generally available, we’ve already worked with customers to mature the product through an innovative iterative development approach. More than 95 customers were active contributors at the time we released the distributed platform version in September 2006 – with about 25 to 30 percent of them using the z/OS version. So the product has been through a lot of cycles already, and customers tell us it is ready for production.
One such customer, a large automobile manufacturer who partnered with us in developing the product, is realizing the benefits of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository for z/OS. With this key SOA component, they’ve been able to discover services across their enterprise and drive service consistency and integrity. In addition, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository enables secure access to services across their environment, and they are using it to implement dynamic lookup of services from WebSphere Message Broker.
CCR2: Thank you for sharing these details about how IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository can help customers realize the benefits of SOA.
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