Enabling Federations of Enterprise Service Buses Using a Distributed Service Registry

The enterprise service bus (ESB) acts as the integration and communications platform for connecting service consumers and providers. It is often desirable to have multiple ESB deployments federate with one another to provide a distributed integration platform that promotes the reuse of services within and across enterprises. However, the existing solutions to federate ESBs are limited by their inflexibility to change and inability to scale. We propose the enablement of a federation of enterprise service buses via a distributed service registry that distributes policy-appropriate service metadata to federation members. We provide a high-level description of two new protocols that maintain the state of the distributed registry within and between autonomous federations. We argue that the use of a distributed service registry and the associated enabling protocols is a novel application of existing technology that creates a robust, scalable, and flexible federation of ESBs that is needed in the next generation of large-scale SOA deployments.