2. Federation
noun : fed·er·a·tion /fɛdəˈreʃ(ə)n/
ɪ
1.the act of federating or uniting in a league.
2.the formation of a political unity, with a central government, by a
number of separate states, each of which retains control of its own
internal affairs.
3.a league or confederacy
4.a federated whole formed by a number of parts, each retaining
control of its own internal affairs
3. Open Service Federation Framework
Context
• Service federation within an organization is about organizing some degree of
coordination & enabling delegation patterns between a set of moderately
independent service domains that each have their own requirements and ways of
going about their business
[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/mts/entry/fede
rated_soa1?lang=en]
• SOA federation enables diverse domains of SOA services and infrastructure to
interoperate seamlessly and transparently as one by delegating among the SOA
domains responsibilities such as service
location, security, activation, mediation, policy enforcement, ensuring high quality-
of-service, and many others [Forrester Research]
• In a federated SOA style, the approach is to allow multiple semi-independent
domains to coexist and interoperate [Gartner]
• Sometimes organizations may even be ‘forced’ to adopt a federated SOA style —
for example, as a consequence of a merger or an acquisition. In this case, it may be
impossible or overly expensive to align the SOA technologies, standards and
governance processes of the acquired companies with those of the acquirer
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4. Open Service Federation Framework
The Need
Intra-Enterprise Scenario
a) Integration between the different business units within an enterprise especially from a
service federation perspective, namely sharing, visibility and discovery of reusable
services across these domains
b) Invocation of services across different domains without compromising the design time or
run time governance principles of the individual domains
c) Service version management in a federated environment, where services owned by one
domain are shared across different domains having the same kind of business needs
d) Consolidation (and reducing redundancy) of business and technical services owned by
different business units across security domains, network segments or even geographies
The challenges get compounded when different domains or business units within
an enterprise implement their respective service-oriented architectures on
different product or technology stacks (typical of enterprises that have grown
inorganically or embraced service-oriented architecture in silos)
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5. Open Service Federation Framework
The Need
Inter-Enterprise Scenario
a) For a supply-chain scenario with multiple trading partners federated as a conglomerate or
consortia, the trading partners may wish to promote their services for reuse by other
partners
— By leveraging their well-established role as B2B intermediaries for e-commerce, many
integration service providers are well-positioned to expand their capabilities to include
cloud computing and, thus, evolve into Cloud Service Brokers
— Cloud Service Brokers also acts as a marketplace for services where service providers
may showcase their services and service consumers may subscribe to the same, based
on their requirements
b) From an individual service consumer perspective, there are not many common platforms
that offer a variety of choice of services (providing the same functionality, albeit with
different service levels) to fulfill a particular business need
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6. Open Service Federation Framework
Solution Scope
A. The Open Service Federation Framework addresses the need for automated, rule-
based sharing of service and service artifacts across the service registries of
different domains within an enterprise or across enterprises
— These domains or enterprises may have their service registries implemented on different
technology stacks
B. The framework allows the federation architect to define the relationship model
between the different domains of an enterprise and set up the rules for the
sharing of service and service artifacts between the federated domains
— The framework supports all the common enterprise domain models appropriate for
implementing a successful federation1
C. The framework, besides creating the entry for the service in the target registry and
triggering the appropriate workflow for the adoption of the service in the target
domain, also creates and deploys the proxy for the service in the mediation
component of the target domain as and when the service is accepted
1Reference: SevenThings to Think About When Initiating Federated SOA, 3 May 2010, Massimo Pezzini
[http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=1363315]
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7. Open Service Federation Framework
Solution Scope
D. The framework may be deployed in either of the following two ways:
a) On-Premise: Deployed within an enterprise to share reusable services between different
business domains and business partners
b) Hosted: Deployed in a cloud-based platform to share reusable services provided by one
enterprise to other enterprises in similar business
E. The framework is composed of the following components:
a) Open Service Federation Manager – the core component which implements the rules and
business logic for service federation
b) Domain Agents – domain technology specific components (implementing a set of common
interfaces and abstract classes) which helps communicate registry events and artifacts to
the Open Service Federation Manager and vice versa; it also creates the service proxy and
deploys it in the mediation component of the domain in which it is collocated
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