What is BEA's microService Architecture Anyway?

By Tony Baer

Last week at the first of its string of BEAWorld conferences, BEA Systems Inc announced a new umbrella SOA architecture into which the pieces of its middleware would fit.

At the risk of stumbling through overlapping and potentially confusing branding, the umbrella is the microService Architecture, or mSA. That's the notion of connecting all the pieces by exposing everything as services.

In turn, SOA 360 is supposed to convey that fact that services-oriented architectures mean more than web services. They also refer to the kinds of services that could be exposed through legacy systems, such as, conveniently, BEA's own Tuxedo UNIX-based transaction monitor. And then there is BEA Workspace 360, where services are composed.

From a mercenary standpoint, mSA, SOA 360, and Workspace 360 together provide a way for BEA to make Tuxedo relevant to customers again. And in the long run, mSA would be a way for core service-enabling modules to be shared across all of BEA's product lines.

From an architectural standpoint, the announcement was about deconstructing portions of BEA's product architecture.

"We have this trove of capabilities that we have with WebLogic that we could harvest," said Paul Patrick, chief architect of the AquaLogic product family. "We could build and bring together [the pieces] in an architectural approach to build a new kind of open, extensible, embeddable platform."

The pieces that BEA exposes would be deployed at run time using OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), a standard for bundling services onto devices at run time.

At the conference, BEA demonstrated several examples of how this might work. It crammed a WebLogic servlet container with some open source functionality onto an edge device with a footprint of only 4 Mbytes. And it showed a so-called "Turtle Box," which used a Linksys router to expose several AquaLogic services within a 24-Mbyte footprint.

From a business standpoint, BEA is trying to slice and dice the functionality of all its products for four different constituencies, covering business analysts, IT architects, developers, and IT operations.

At the core of this is BEA's idea of "workspaces" for which the recently acquired Flashline repository (rebranded BEA Enterprise Repository) forms the hub. That's where services would be composed, using functionality that would be shared by the different constituencies.

Although BEA just announced the strategy, the details remain a work in progress. "You don't have to make everything a component," said Patrick. "The key is figuring what are the right pieces that are most likely to be shared." And that's what BEA's still figuring out.

At this point, some of the componentization is already done in WebLogic 9.2, but plans have not been firmed or announced for BEA's other products. A few of the details will be unveiled in at upcoming BEAWorld conferences being held in Prague and Beijing in October and December, respectively.

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