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Best practices for modelling SOA services on ESB

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Nicholas Fam (DHL IT Services)
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My organization uses ESB heavily for the services our application expose and consume. Application don't interact with each other but through ESB services. Services can be atomic, composite, or simply pass through.

I'm struggling to find a way to model this effectively in LeanIX. There is no "Service" factsheet type and this doesn't fit entirely as an "Application" expect it does have consuming and exposing interfaces. If I do not model this as "Application", it won't be recognized in the data flow diagram.

I think services developed using this architecture pattern (SOA on ESB) is quite common in the industry and I would like to understand how is this done by others and if there is any best practices to model this in LeanIX.

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5 comments

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    Andrew De Bruyne (Brussels Airlines)

    Dear Nicholas,

    did you manage to work out a valid solution for your problem mapping out an ESB in LeanIX? We are facing the exact same problem and don't manage to find a right way to do it.

    Thanks for your feedback,
    Andrew

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    Eileen Dornan

    Dear Nicholas and Andrew

    I'm facing this challenge also, also trying to model "Endpoints" -  interesting that there's no solution here.  I'll dig deeper on community search now, I'll try the voting feature too ;-)

    Thanks - Eileen

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    Eileen Dornan

    Dear Nicholas and Andrew

    I'm facing this challenge also, also trying to model "Endpoints", and designing an API surface to guide future development.  Interesting that there's no solution here.  I'll dig deeper on community search now.

    Thanks - Eileen

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    Penhollow, Mike

    We have the same issue with be it ESB or Application hosting multiple endpoints. We have chosen at this point to model the middleware as an App but with the data flow you can't easily follow Providing App A to consuming app ESB to now Providing App ESB to Consuming App B
    It feels a bit messy. 

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    Colin Brain

    We have done this to date by creating an IT Component to represent an endpoint attached to the provide application, and then used the Interface FactSheet to represent an instance of the application to application link with the endpoint IT Component as a dependency.

    I notice that we can now create our own FactSheet types so will give this a go to see whether that is any better....

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