Dynamic service versioning: Network-based approach (DSV-N)

Abstract

The version of a service describes the service functionality, guiding client on the details for accessing the service. Service versioning requires optimal strategies to appropriately manage versions of the service which result from changes during service life cycle. However, there is no standard for handling service versions which leads to the difficulties in tracing changes, measuring their impact as well as managing multiple services concurrently without any backward compatibility issues. Sometime these services need to be modified as per the client’s prerequisites which result in a new version of the existing service, and changes done in the services may or may not be backward compatible. If changes done in the services are not backward compatible, then it can create compatibility issues in the client side code which is using these service features. The problem aggregates even more when a product requires customization for its clients with minor differences in each version. This results in deploying multiple versions of the service for each one of them. This work describes DSV-N (Dynamic Service Versioning-Network-Based Approach) to handle issues related to change management of the service. DSV-N is also capable of handling both backward and incompatible changes. This paper also extends the functionality of dynamic service dispatching by using it with service versioning so that the versions do not need to reside in the memory permanently except the system bus which will execute the appropriate version at run time. Another advantage of using DSV-N is that multiple service versions are required to be bound with the system bus merely (which is the address of all the service versions for the client). DSV-N automates the process of replicating identical modules in different versions of the service with the help of component file in which version id(s) is(are) prefixed to each module name. DSV-N also provides backward compatibility because the appropriate version that needs to be executed will be resolved at run time. Another advantage DSV-N provides is that the component file needs to be parsed only if the service modules of the component file are modified or only for the first request.