Enabling horizontal scalability in an open source enterprise services bus

Abstract

Cloud computing is a recent paradigm which describes a new way of consuming and delivering IT Services. In the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, an underlying infrastructure such as network, operative system or server is provided to the Cloud consumers for either deploying their own applications, or applications supplied by the Cloud provider. In effect, Cloud computing modifies how applications should be built, provided, and consumed, as they may provide or be totally exposed as services, or consume existing third party applications services. The main advantages in Cloud computing are related to dynamic scaling of resources which are able to adapt to changes based on demand of resources and the use of multi-tenancy techniques in order based on sharing of resources between different users towards achieving the economy of scale.

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is essential as an integration middleware between application and services within and between multiple Cloud infrastructures. Different communication protocols might be used by application services and it is therefore necessary to have a mediator between them. Several challenges might arise when using an ESB as communication mediator between applications in cloud when to scale in and scale out to optimize resource consumption. The number of ESB instances should vary depending on the load in the Cloud infrastructure. This can be achieved by dynamically scaling in and out multiple ESB instances which constitute the horizontal ESB cluster.

In this Master Thesis we focus on enabling horizontal scalability support for an open source multi-tenant aware Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The investigation is based on two possible scenarios for enabling horizontal scalability: interconnected vs. non interconnected ESB instances. Therefore, in this work we investigate their advantages, disadvantages, and possible challenges and solutions. Based on previous investigations, a realization approach for enabling multi-instance management of a multi-tenant aware ESB is provided.