In the last years the interaction among heterogeneous applications within one or among multiple enterprises has considerably increased. This fact has arisen several challenges related to how to enable the interaction among enterprises in an interoperable manner. Towards addressing this problem, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has been proposed as an integration middleware capable of wiring all the components of an enterprise system in a transparent and interoperable manner. Enterprise Service Buses are nowadays used to transparently establish and handle interactions among the components within an application or with consumed external services. There are several ESB solutions available in the market as a result of continuously developing message-based approaches aiming at enabling interoperability among enterprise applications. However, the configuration of an ESB is typically custom, and complex. Moreover, there is little support and guidance for developers related to how to efficiently customize and configure the ESB with respect to their application requirements. Consequently, this fact also increments notably the maintenance and operational costs for enterprises. Our target is mainly to simplify the configuration tasks at the same time as provisioning customized ESB instances to satisfy the application’s functional and non-functional requirements. Similar works focus on optimizing existing ESB configurations based on runtime reconfiguration rather than offering customized light-weight middleware components.

This Master thesis aims at providing the means to build customized and specialized ESB instances following a reusable and light-weight approach. We propose the creation of a framework capable of guiding the application developer in the tasks related to configuring, provisioning, and executing specialized ESB instances in an automatic, dynamic, and reusable manner. Specialized ESB instances are created automatically and provided to application developers that can build an ESB instance with a specific configuration which may change over time. The proposed framework also incorporates the necessary support for administering, provisioning, and maintaining a clustered infrastructure hosting the specialized ESB instances in an isolated manner.