Service Application Framework improvement in SharePoint 2010

The Service Application Framework provides a platform that allows developers to build scalable applications that are hosted in SharePoint 2010. These services can provide data or processing resources to other SharePoint features. The Service Application Framework enables services to be shared between computers on a server farm; it also helps load manages the services in SharePoint. The Service Application Framework provides over 20 services that are built into the core product.. The Service Application Framework is an API that is provided to build services that are hosted by back-end application servers and consumed by front-end Web servers. The Service Application Framework replaces the Shared Services Provider in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Service Application Framework model is much more flexible than the Shared Services Provider model. Service applications can be used by a single server farm or shared across farms, allowing centralized shared computing investments. Service Application Framework applications are easily scaled out for load balancing high-demand service applications.

Reasons to use the Service Application Framework include the following:

1. To provide specialized computations and analytics that are consumable by multiple SharePoint Web applications

2. To share data across sites and site collections, providing multiple instances of your application in a farm for hosting scenarios

3. To execute long-running operations

4. To use the common management and provisioning infrastructure provided by the Service Application Framework

In order to use a Shared Service, a Service Application must be provisioned. A Service Application is a farm level instance, "logical instance", of a Shared Service. A Service Application consists of the following:

1. Administrative interface

2. Application Pool

3. Databases

4. Physical Instance

As I mentioned above not all Service Applications are the same. Each one is unique and may or may not contain the above components listed. For Example: SharePoint OOB comes with Excel Shared Service. Until you deploy and create a service application, you cannot consume that shared service. Service Applications can be provisioned automatically using the Farm Configuration Wizard or manually by using Central Administrator\Manage Service Application page. Power Shell can also be used to create Service Applications.

Redundancy Built-in

As you know multiple application servers can run a physical instance of the same Service Application. This provides redundancy in that requests from WFE's pass through a built in load balancer to locate available application server running a physical instance.

Load Balancing

It uses Use Round robbing load balancing Service application proxy method invocations must be routed thru the front end web server to an appropriate app server by using a load balancing tool. Calls between front-end and app servers to require separate external load balancer than the load balancing for front-end web servers

Management and Administration Services plug their management UI into SharePoint Service Management page. This has a Common admin tools such as upgrade, backup, restore and account management .Common UI to manage, start, stop, group, associate, federate and backup SharePoint services. It can define specialized admin roles and can be delegated to users who are not farm admins.