Service application architecture – Basic concepts

This is the beginning of a series of articles on service applications in SharePoint.

• 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

In this post I will cover some basic concepts about service applications. Although some topics like history and differences between old SSP model and service application model are omitted as there are enough resources available.

Following are the important keywords we should know

• Service application instance : Actual instance of the service (binaries) running on the server
• Service application : Logical component that contains the service configuration and management (e.g.: service application configuration info)
• Service application connection : Interface used by the service consumers for communicating with the service and the load balancer
• Service application proxy group : Group of service application connections associated with web applications

In this post I will present some scenarios where we can use above concepts differently.

1. One service application instance, one service application, one service application connection, one service application proxy group and one or more web applications

2. Multiple service applications with one service application instance and one service application connection for each, one service application proxy group and one or more web applications

3. Multiple service applications with one service application instance a for each, multiple service application proxy group and one or more web applications

4. Service applications with multiple service application instances