At what point should ESB be used to manage incoming WCF service requests?H

Question

I am relatively new to the Azure world and would like some information about using ESB, and if I am not providing enough details, please just ask for more...

I have a public-facing WCF service that is running just fine, and I am aware that the WCF service itself is quite resilient in handling a large number of requests.

The requests are relatively short-lived, and database back-end is fully optimized (low latency).

I would like to know at what point should Enterprise Service Bus be considered and thrown into the mix, and whether it is worth it?

Answer 1

If you plan to have one service only, then it seems you don't need an ESB. Also, the properties of the service you mentioned (resilience, etc.) should not affect your decision as an ESB will not help you solve this type of issues.

If you were to have several services that perhaps even interact between each other, then you might need to provide transformation of protocol/transport between them, perhaps orchestration, monitoring (SLA) and statistics, common security, etc. In that case you could think about having an ESB that would handle this for you.

Again, think about how your whole "business" will look like in the future.

Answer 2

You can implement your own service registry if you follow tutorials like this: http://www.infoq.com/articles/net-service-registry

Or you can a middleware provided by http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/registry/overview/index.html.

Open source alternative could be the following: http://www.membrane-soa.org/service-proxy/ Even though the website says ESB on the documentation, it is really just providing the feature of service registry and api to make calls to your registered endpoints