SaaSGrid’s dynamic and scalable web services management layer provides a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the topology and usage of your SaaSGrid servers. Fundamentally, SaaSGrid’s hosting components “stitch” these servers together into a single UI, web service, and database hosting fabric. Each participating server in this fabric is capable of hosting any Windows Communication Foundation pieces of your application(s). The web services management layer makes it easy for you to conduct capacity planning, restructure the web services topology, perform maintenance on a participating server without interrupting service, and more. The key is that your application does not need to be reconfigured, redeployed, or even interrupted while you perform these typically disruptive actions to one or more of the live instances of your web services.
One simple action that can be performed in the SaaSGrid Operations Center is moving a web service intance from one participating server to another. Here’s how to do it:
Identify the web service instance you’d like to move. For instance, let’s say that we need to move all instances of the TenantPortal web service off of a server named ‘TA2K8’ (maybe we’re taking it offline for repairs). To do so, we’ll use the Service Catalog in the SaaSGrid Operations Center, locate the TenantPortal service definition in the tree on the left, and select the ‘Control Panel’ tab.
The Control Panel tab displays a list of known instances of the TenantPortalService running within your SaaSGrid fabric environment. Each item in the list shows the server (host) that is running the instance, the unique id of the instance, and process information for that instance on the server. The bottom part of Control Panel contains a list of servers in your environment that can be used to host web services.
We’ll click and hold on the specific instance of the TenantPortal service (in this example there is only one instance of the service running in our environment), and we’ll drag that instance to a new target in the bottom part of the Control Panel tab. In this example, we’ll move the instance from the server named ‘TA2K8’ to the server named ‘TA2K3’, so we’ll drop the service instance on the icon for server ‘TA2K3’.
When we drop the service instance on ‘TA2K3’, this will instruct SaaSGrid to issue to commands:
After a few seconds, we’ll be able to verify that the process successfully moved the service instance from TA2K8 to TA2K3. To do so, we’ll go to the Infrastructure & Services page in the Operations Center. First, click on the server TA2K8 and then the Web Service Registrations tab. The most recent event in the list will be the Unregistration of the TenantPortal service instance. The check mark indicates that the instance was successfully removed from the server at 11:38am.
Next, we’ll verify that the new web service instance is up and running on TA2K3. Click on the server TA2K3 and then the WCF Service Registrations tab. As expected, the most recent item in the list is the Registration event for a new TenantPortal service instance. The check mark indicates that they instance was successfully installed on the server at 11:38am.
Lastly, we’ll look at the list of running service instances on TA2K3, and there is our brand new service instance running as process 896.
What we’ve illustrated here is that SaaSGrid’s web services management layer, which does most web service deployment and routing automatically for your application, can be used to manually perform actions that would otherwise require reconfiguration of application components and surely would take longer than the ~8 seconds it took to move the TenantPortal web service to a new server. Additionally, every web service listed in your SaaSGrid Service Catalog can have multiple instances running across your SaaSGrid environment to increase the “firepower” behind that particular web service. This also provides built-in redundancy, as SaaSGrid’s routing ensures that requests for your application’s web services reach an endpoint on a live service instance, even while you are manually changing the topology of your fabric. The SaaSGrid Operations Center puts these robust and dynamic web service management capabilities right in your browser.