What is Business Flow? (or bizflow?)

SOA privileges the way workflows and processes are assembled and maintained, and the way they work during execution in terms of process state and process data. This is done through several open languages and implemented in both open source and proprietary software solutions that enable a developer to outline and execute complex interaction flows.

sense allows you to define a flow or logical sequence of business services using a simple and straight forward language in plain XML.  Each business flow, sometimes called bizflow, can be treated as any other sense service and therefore be assigned business value, performance and quality goals. In effect a bizflow can be treated as just another service to sense.

A sense bizflow represents a larger grained unit of business value and activity that sense can manage to ensure the most appropriate computing resources are brought to play to achieve the defined business targets of the flow, its Business SLA.

sense bizflow

bizflows are workflows and business processes that are externally interfaced as sense services, this means that the logic of the information flow:

  • is assimilated inside the federation as a normal sense service;
  • is configured with SLAs that indicate how the business flow is performing against targets and how the system can scale next requests in the cloud of services
  • responds with a mock strategy when all the business flows inside the cloud are suffering too much (SLA level ‘No Service’).
This scenario elevates any supported generic workflow language (WS-BPEL, jBPM, etc.) that coordinates business activities to the cloud computing paradigm while governing the workflow as a reliable unit of work.
When executing, a bizflow calls the services, the feelings, and other bizflows within the federation according to the same SLA processing and performance selection as any other service call.  This guarantees that not only the bizflow is operating as efficiently and reliably as possible but, all the constituent activities of the bizflow are also managed with the same discipline.

Conclusion

sense Business Flows, or bizflows, provide a way to implement larger grained pieces of business work by linking and logically sequencing individual services (or other bizflows) into a single logical unit of work. Each bizflow is itself considered a service (as well as the constituent services called by the business flow) and can be monitored and managed by sense in the same way as other services and feelings.

go to faq