| This is one in a series of notes I will be making while attending the SharePoint Conference in Vegas. These are not intended to be complete, polished, edited blog posts. Its simply the highlights, as I saw it, from the sessions I attended. - New, flexible, extensible services architecture that can be used by developers
- Overview
- What is a Services Application? An Application Server Tier feature that performs the useful function of providing data or processing resources to SharePoint features.
- Search is a good example of a Services Application
- Service Application
- Configured logical instance of a service
- Provides data or computing resources
- Comes with a Administration interface
- How is a Service Application used
- Features, for example Web Parts use these application
- You associate a web application with a service application
- This is done via a proxy
- Associations done by Admins, can be changed anytime
- This a much like SSP’s, but this has been further simplified
- Can be grouped for administrative reasons “Service Application Proxy Group”
- Service Workflow
- Brower –> Web Front End –> eg. Search Page –> (Software load balancer) –> Application Server –> returns
- 2007 versus 2010
- SSP is where we were
- The old services are still there BUT they are no longer grouped together in an SSP, they all operate independently
- There are also a lot more services now, 20 or more.
- The platform for building these services is now open
- Services applications are supported in Foundation (WSS), though different SKU’s will come with different service applications
- Whats new? Framework
- There is no more SSP administration site, Central admin and Powershell
- Greater flexibility, Services can been assigned to Web Apps
- Software Load Balancer and fail over (load balancer can be replaced by a third party load balancer)
- Cross Farm support
- Share to anyone and consume from anywhere
- WCF based communications
- Whats new? Security
- Everything is based on Claims based authentication
- Intra server communications is based on WCF communications
- Supports SSL
- Each application uses its own database, and optionally own application pool
- Multi-Tennancy
- Application level security protects the information in one Service Application from another. So it adds an application security boundary within a database and within an application pool.
- Application Directory and Load Balance Service Application
- Responsible for sharing the list of available services to other applications
- Discovery mechanism.
- This is really seriously cool stuff. You can now effectively deploy farms that are dedicated to specific tasks. A search farm for example.
- PowerShell is everywhere: “Can use PowerShell for pretty much everything”
- By Default all service applications are associated with all web applications, associations are not direct but through a proxy. This can then be configured.
- Farm Admins have access to all Service Application, but you can delegate permissions to a specific user for a specific service.
- Building Service Applications (this is what I have been waiting for)
- The OOB service applications have been built on the same API developers can use
- You get:
- Multi-Server Support
- Fault Tolerant Round Robin Load Balancing
- Timer Job Support
- Even the Load Balancer is extensible, very cool
- Settings can be stored in the configuration Database, and you can add your own databases and manage them through SharePoint (integrates then for example with Backup/Restore)
- Can create your own Central Admin pages
- Lots of controls that can be reused
- Can create your own PowerShell Commandlets
- Sample Topologies
- Seems to me that there are many, many topologies
- Flexibility of the model though should make it something you design specifically to suit
- Services Farm. Seems to me that this makes a lot of sense.
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