Multiple Endpoints
In an SOA environment, the tracking and management of service endpoints is a key task. Not only is your SOA environment likely have many individual services, but many of those services will be deployed on multiple endpoints.
In general, a service will have multiple endpoints for the following reasons:
It acquires additional endpoints as it moves through its lifecycle. For example, by the time a service goes into production, it is usually available at three different endpoints in your environment: at a development endpoint, at a test endpoint and at a production endpoint. To track the endpoints that a service acquires as it moves through its development cycle, you add the endpoints to the metadata for the service in the registry.
It has different endpoints to accommodate the needs of different consumer applications. For example, you might offer the same service over multiple entry protocols (for example, both JMS and HTTP) and/or with different security mechanisms. In
CentraSite, you accommodate these needs by exposing the service over multiple virtual services.
