Introduction to Service Application - Part 2

In my previous post on "Introduction to Service Application" I have explained the concept of why did we come up with Service Application model,what are the different types of service application available as of now (till Beta 2) and also explained terms such as proxy,proxy group. At the end I also listed down the service application (SA) that can be shared across farms.

This blog is a continuation of my previous post and this post I will be discussing the concept of cross farms v/s child farm (just a short topic but an important one!!) and also some more topics....

CHILD FARM : In MOSS 2007 we used to create SSP and share the services of that SSP with other farms.So the farm thar is providing the services would be the parent farm and the farm that is consuming the services is the child farm.Most of the services were consumed by the child except excel services as this service was not able to share with other farms.One major problem in this scenario was that the child farm should have access to the parent farm database which led to lot of confusion and misconfiguration.
CROSS FARM : In SharePoint Server 2010, as you may already know that we dont have the concept of SSP and so we had the parent-child relationship at all. What we do have is the concept of cross farm where any farm can consume services from any other farm
For instance Say we have FARM A and it has managed metadata service application running the we have another remote farm called FARM B. Now we decide that FARM B would like to consume the metadata service from FARM A. So we just need to publish the metadata service in FARM A and when from FARM B we try to connect to FARM A (for the metadata service) a proxy will be created in FARM B and it will take care of the communication.

(I will be writing a seperate blogpost on how to publish and consume the services.)

The main advantage of the cross farm is that the FARM B doesnot need any permission on the databases present in FARM A.

Also any web application consume services from any farm in any combination. For example:

FARM A: Managed Metadata Service, BDC,Secure Store Service.
FARM B: Search and web analytics.
A Web application (WA1) is created in FARM A. So WA1 can consume BDC,Search,Metadata service or any combination of the service that are published and available.That is we can consume both local and remote service applications.

We can also have an entire farm build that can just host all the services.This is help in scaling the services to a very large extent.

Lastly all the Service application communication happens over HTTP and the service application are built on WCF.