* Web services management
How would you feel if I was to suggest that you bet the farm on not one but several standards that are all in flux and where the implementations available to date have unknown and largely unexplored security problems? You would probably think that the bet was not so much bad as reckless and indicative of serious mental problems.
Yet that is exactly what many of you are doing in the rush towards Web services adoption. And the reasons are obvious: Web services are the underpinnings of the next generation of IT systems.
So what are you going to do? You could be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The answer is to wrap your Web services in a management architecture so that you can focus on the business aspects of building Web services.
A leading player in the Web management space, Flamenco Networks (see links below) last month announced the next version Flamenco WSM, the company’s Web Services Management platform.
Flamenco WSM is a distributed system based on a “controller” and a number of proxies. The controller collects data from the proxies (available for Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris) to monitor and manage Web services transactions.
The proxies support security functions including authentication, authorization, policy, encryption, digital signatures and non-repudiation for Web services applications.
The big changes in this release, WSM 4.0, are performance improvements (Flamenco stopped using Java for the proxies in favor of C and C++), support for WS-Security, and what Flamenco calls a “shock absorber.”
The shock absorber is a scheme to simplify upgrading the proxies as the Web services protocols evolve. This update mechanism allows for “on the fly” code replacement without losing any Simple Object Application Protocol (SOAP) messages or having to reboot.
WSM 4.0 pricing starts at $100,000 and comes in two versions: Enterprise Edition and Service Provider Edition. The company also offers an outsourced (hosted) version of WSM – price on application.
