Adaptive ESB Infrastructure for Service Based Systems

Abstract

Service-based systems increasingly need adaptation capabilities to agilely respond to unexpected changes in their business or execution environment. Although service orientation constitutes a promising approach to achieve this goal, current methods and technologies do not fully support automatic and dynamic adaptation at runtime. In turn, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), one of the preferred middleware technologies to support the development of service-based systems, provides several built-in mediation capabilities (e.g. message transformation), which can be used to perform adaptation actions. However, the configuration of these capabilities cannot usually be performed at runtime. This chapter proposes an Adaptive ESB Infrastructure which, based on the mediation capabilities provided by ESBs, can respond to adaptation requirements in service-based systems in an automatic and dynamic way at runtime. The chapter also specifies how the proposed solutions can be used to deal with concrete situations including response time degradation, services saturation, and changes in services contracts.