AppFabric component

Question

Explain about the AppFabric component?

Answer 1

The AppFabric component is used for creating access control and distribute the messages through the enterprises and clouds. It has service-oriented architecture, and is considered as the backbone of the Windows Azure platform. It gives the connectivity and messaging among the distributed applications. It also has the abilities of integrating the applications and the business processes between the cloud services and also between the cloud services and global applications.

The AppFabric component offers a development environment that is combined with the Visual Studio 2010.The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services built in VS 2010 can be published on cloud from the Visual Studio design environment.

Two significant services of AppFabric are as follows:

a) Access Control Service (ACS) - Allows rules-driven and claims-based access control for the distributed applications. These claims-based instructions and authorization roles could be defined in the cloud in order to access on-premise and the cloud services. Claim can be a user or application attribute, which the service application expects, like e-mail address, phone number, password, and role, for appropriate access control. Whenever any application wants to use the Web service, it provides the required claims to ACS for requesting a token. ACS converts the input claims into the output claims by following the rules of mapping. These rules are created while the configuration of ACS. The ACS issues a token comprising the output claims for the consumer application. This application uses the token in the request header and sends to Web service. This service authenticates the claims in the token and gives appropriate access to the user.

b) Service bus –It gives messaging between the cross-enterprise and cross-cloud scenarios. It provides publish or subscribe, queues message and point-to-point patterns for exchange of messages across distributed applications in the cloud. It assimilates with Access Control service in order to establish the secure relay and communication.