A typical configuration for
WebSphere
Business Integration Event Broker is
to use a set of three or more domains, consisting of development, test, and
production domains:
- Development domain
- In a development domain, message flow developers create message flows
and unit test them in a sandbox environment. These message flows are typically
deployed using Rapid Application Development (RAD), and the brokers in the
domain are not responsible for handling business critical data.
- Test domain
- Message flows in the development domain are eventually promoted to a test
domain, where message flows are tested against recent, but not live, production
data in a realistic broker configuration.
- Production domain
- When message flows in the test domain are deemed to be robust enough,
they are promoted to the production domain. This is the domain responsible
for performing actual business transactions, and message flows in the domain
work with live data. Non-critical updates to production flows usually take
place only at predefined service intervals.
Development and test domains must be migrated before
production domains. Migrating the development domain first minimizes potential
downtime associated with any migration. In addition, development domains are
likely to require access to new broker function before test and production
domains do. As message flows that make use of new function are developed and
then promoted into test and production domains, this necessitates the migration
of the test and production domains.
As each Message
Brokers Toolkit can
administer multiple domains, be careful when migrating instances of the Message
Brokers Toolkit not to affect any domains that have
not been migrated yet. Note that a Version 6.0 Message
Brokers Toolkit can administer Version 5.0 domains
and vice versa.