Chapter 9. Infrastructure of the Service Bus

In this chapter, we describe the different elements that constitute an SOA-enabling infrastructure, referred to in the following as a service bus. One of the fundamental principles that this chapter is based upon is the assumption that it is impossible for large organizations to enforce standardization on a single technical architecture. We believe that this is especially true with respect to communication middleware, application platforms, or interface technology. Consequently, this chapter is not about describing specific technical standards for a service bus. Instead, we propose to look at a service bus as a kind of meta bus, which is comprised of the different existing software buses and middleware platforms that you will find in your organization. The job of the service bus is not only to enable basic interaction with different service components across the different platforms, but also to tie together the different higher-level infrastructure functions of these platforms.

After a general overview of the service bus concept in Section 9.1, Section 9.2 looks at logging and auditing, followed by scalability and availability in Section 9.3, and security in Section 9.4.