CentraSite offers various scenarios for exercising the consumer registration at design-time and run-time in Business user interface. At design-time, you might want to register as consumer of an asset instance of any asset type, for example, “REST service” in which case you do not have to specify any authentication settings (API Key or OAuth Token) or consumer identifiers, and would access the asset to examine the usage; whereas at run-time, you might want to register as consumer of an asset instance of a virtual type, for example, “Virtual REST Service” in which you case you will have to specify the authentication settings or consumer identifiers or both, and would invoke the asset to query and obtain the data.