How logical components of service applications map to physical components

This is the 2^nd article of a series of articles regarding service applications. If you missed the first post you can visit it before proceeding with this.

• Part 1 : Service application architecture – Basic Concepts
• Part 2 : How logical components of service applications map to physical components
• Part 3 : How to plan Service Applications in SharePoint 2013
• Part 4 : Change application pool of an existing service application

It’ll be very helpful to know how each logical component of a service application (e.g: service application, service application instance etc..) are mapped to physical entities in the farm. In this article I’ll explain the relationship which will help you to understand the service application architecture properly

I’ll take Managed Metadata Service application to explain the relationship with physical components in the farm

1. Service application instance

When we setup SharePoint in a server, certain libraries and some resources are copied to the ISAPI folder in 15 hive (C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI). Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll is also available in the same path which contains the application logic related to Managed Metadata Service.

Furthermore MetadataWebService.svc file which is used to host the service logic is located in WebServices folder in 15 hive (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\WebServices).

Since we need to host the MetadataWebService.svc in IIS we need to start “Managed Metadata Web Service” from the services on this server section. If the service is started, we can say the Managed Metadata service application instance is running on that server.

2. Service application

If the service application instance is started in the server, when we create a service application from “Manage Service Application” section a new application will be created in IIS.

If we create multiple service applications, there will be multiple applications exist in IIS.

Lets assume that we’ve created two Managed Metadata service applications, then we can expect 2 applications in IIS which hosts the same MetadataWebService.svc service.

Following are the service applications I have

Following are the respective service applications created in IIS

3. Service application connection and proxy group

They are logical components but entries are kept in the database