Identifying Architectural Design Trade-Offs in Service Registry Features

Abstract

Service registry's main responsibility on cloud andweb service platforms among cataloging the services is to manage service capability descriptions and deliver binding instructions of suitable services to their requesters. This paper presents a scenario based evaluation on a set of existing and planned features of a certain service registry implementation in order to identify the architectural risks and trade-offs. The analysis applies the ATAM method and its SOA and REST related extensions to the service organization, related communication patterns and interfaces of the existing and new planned active features including service brokering. These are investigated from the quality point of view to identify the benefits and possible risks of such architectural decisions especially related to the new planned feature. The analysis exposed risks and trade-offs of the existing features andmost importantly new added value and design risks of the newfeature but also demonstrated applicability of the ATAM basedmethods and its additions.