Today's enterprises are rapidly adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a strategy for delivering business applications that can be developed and extended quickly.
CentraSite is a comprehensive and extensible SOA governance platform that you can deploy to support numerous usage scenarios. CentraSite provides a single platform for design-time and run-time governance, enabling enterprises to manage their Web services from the request stage through the deployment and maintenance stages of their lifecycle.
CentraSite supports the development of SOA-based applications by enabling developers, architects and business analysts to:
Publish Web services and other reusable assets into their organization's central registry.
Discover Web services and other reusable assets and use them to assemble new applications.
Obtain detailed information about a Web service, including the list of its consumers, its technical support contacts, its disposition in the development lifecycle, usage tips and performance data.
Examine the relationships that a Web service has with other artifacts in the SOA environment in order to understand how a change to that service will impact the service's sub-components and dependants.
CentraSite supports an array of design-time tools that enable developers, architects and business analysts to discover, publish and reuse SOA assets.
Managing the content of the registry is critical to the success of an SOA environment. To support this effort, CentraSite's governance capabilities and tools enable administrators and architects to:
Control access to CentraSite and to individual assets listed in the registry.
Model the specific entities and artifacts that make up an organization's SOA environment.
Enable reuse of computing assets by providing easy access to in-depth information about an artifact's technical properties, semantics and relationships to other artifacts in the SOA.
Define classification systems (taxonomies) to ensure that Web services and other assets can be easily discovered and managed.
Impose mandatory testing, approval processes and/or quality checks on assets to ensure that they adhere to organizational standards and policies.
Model the development lifecycle for a type of asset and specify policies that are to be triggered when an asset transitions from one lifecycle state to another.
CentraSite provides tools that support the management and monitoring of services in the run-time environment. Using CentraSite, administrators can define policies that execute on policy enforcement points (PEPs) that reside between the consumer and the service endpoint. These policies typically perform security-related activities (such as authentication and message encryption/decryption), auditing/logging tasks and performance reporting functions.
When webMethods Mediator is used as a policy enforcement point, administrators can define and deploy "virtual services" into the run-time environment. Virtual services operate as consumer-facing proxies for the endpoints where Web services are actually hosted. Besides performing security, logging and monitoring activities, a virtual service can also execute advanced mediation steps such as message routing, load-balancing, failover handling and message transformation.
CentraSite supports the run-time environment by enabling you to:
Define and manage standard run-time policies.
Attach run-time policies to Web services and deploy the policies to specified PEPs in the run-time environment.
Define and deploy "virtual services" to perform mediation steps such as routing, load-balancing, failover and/or message transformation.
Monitor the run-time performance of services and identify services that fail to meet specified thresholds.
Out of the box, CentraSite provides support for the following policy-enforcement points and run-time monitoring products:
webMethods Mediator, which is a PEP that provides policy enforcement, service mediation and monitoring capabilities. webMethods Mediator enforces run-time policies that you create in CentraSite.
webMethods Insight, which is a monitoring tool that enables you to see what is happening in real-time with service transactions as they flow across any system. It provides visibility and control at the transaction level to heterogeneous SOA environments.
CentraSite also includes a framework called SOALink, which enables it to interoperate with other, third-party PEPs.
