Service Versions: Active, Published, Discoverable

As part of your SOA governance efforts, you should have a process for service lifecycle management. Many already use the policy that the three latest major versions of a service is supported, but at different endpoints due to the lack of service virtualization.

As using service virtualization becomes more common for doing lifecycle management, you need to categorize your services into lifecycle stages. Typical stages are

• Provisioning
• Active - Published
• Active - Deprecated
• Decommissioned

Only the latest major active version should be the "published" version, i.e. the WSDL provided by the virtual endpoint. All the other active versions are considered deprecated, and should not get any new consumers. The virtual endpoint must accept requests to all active versions, both the latest and the deprecated versions.

Existing consumers of deprecated versions should as soon as possible move to the a newer discoverable version (see figure), preferably the published version. Note how even if there is only one published version, the active major versions can still be discovered through a service registry.

These service versioning lifecycle policies are illustrated in the above figure. Note how only the latest major version should allow multiple minor versions to be active. A recommended practice is to have max two such active minor versions. Still, only the latest version of the service should be discoverable.

It is important to minimize the number of active and discoverable versions of the services. This makes it easier to manage and communicate with the service consumers the force them to move on before their version becomes decommissioned. The virtualized endpoints must be monitored, so that you know how much a deprecated service is used - and who those consumers are.