SOA Patterns > Inventory Implementation Patterns > Inventory Endpoint
Inventory Endpoint (Erl)
How can a service inventory be shielded from external access while still offering service capabilities to external consumers?
Problem
A group of services delivered for a specific inventory may provide capabilities that are useful to services outside of that inventory. However, for security and governance reasons, it may not be desirable to expose all services or all service capabilities to external consumers.
Solution
Abstract the relevant capabilities into an endpoint service that acts as a the official inventory entry point dedicated to a specific set of external consumers.
Application
The endpoint service can expose a contract with the same capabilities as its underlying services, but augmented with policies or other characteristics to accommodate external consumer interaction requirements.
Impacts
Endpoint services can increase the governance freedom of underlying services but can also increase governance effort by introducing redundant service logic and contracts into an inventory.
Architecture
Inventory
A new service introduced to facilitate external consumer requirements can ensure that other native inventory services are not affected.
Related Patterns in This Catalog
Atomic Service Transaction, Composition Autonomy, Concurrent Contracts, Contract Centralization, Data Format Transformation, Data Model Transformation, Domain Inventory, Enterprise Inventory, Logic Centralization, Process Abstraction, Protocol Bridging, Redundant Implementation, Service Façade, Service Normalization, Service Perimeter Guard
Related Service-Oriented Computing Goals
This page contains excerpts from:
SOA Design Patterns by Thomas Erl
(ISBN: 0136135161, Hardcover, Full-Color, 400+ Illustrations, 865 pages)
For more information about this book, visit www.arcitura.com/books.