Architecture and Benefits

The building blocks of first-generation Enterprise Service Buses, in existence since Fiorano shipped the first ESB in November 2001, have been reasonably well established: Event-driven Messaging, Web services, distributed routing, and standards-based Transformation (illustrated in Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: First Generation ESB

Experience has shown that while necessary, these capabilities are not sufficient to fully support SOA deployments in practice. Particular drawbacks of first-generation ESB architectures include, among others, a separation of process composition from implementation, manual deployment of services, inability to extend processes incrementally and lack of support for configuration management.

Fiorano's Second-Generation ESB Architecture solves these and other problems by extending and enhancing the ESB infrastructure with several advanced features, together with a service-composition layer that merges business-process management, service-integration and messaging as illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Second Generation ESB

In particular, Second-generation ESB architecture adds the following critical features to first-generation infrastructure:

• Unified-View process composition in which the logical application design is mapped directly to the physical implementation, making the development process more intuitive and easier than that of conventional integration suites
• Dynamic deployment of Services to network end-points
• Monitoring and management Services from a central location
• Peer-to-Peer messaging between distributed Services, without the necessity of data having to traverse a central hub, allowing linear performance and scalability
• Configuration management of labeled services and service-oriented processes, with controlled deployment across network end-points and automatic transitions across the software lifecycle (development, QA, staging, production)