All services running inside the Datapower need to be installed on the appliance IP address and on the port. As the number of services increase on the appliance, it does create complexity and following underline issues to any environment:

1. Exposure of internal ports (and IP address in some cases) to outside their hosting network.
2. Firewall configuration to allow traffic on different ports (and IP addresses) of Datapower
3. Maintaining IP addresses and ports as the number of services increases on the appliance

There may be other solutions to handle the above mentioned issues but one of the simplest and easy solutions is to implement a framework service in Datapower environment to minimize the exposure of ports and their configuration on firewall. Here we are naming this service Enterprise Framework service.

The Enterprise framework service provides the following features:

1. Provide single point of entry for all services running inside the Datapower
2. Can handle requests over HTTP, HTTPs, MQ and FTP protocols
3. It uses the standard HTTP (80) and / or HTTPS (443) ports. So the firewall can only be configured for these standard ports
4. Authenticate all in coming requests based on their security requirement, i.e. Mutual authentication, or one-way SSL.
5. Identify the client from the incoming request
6. Identify the environment where the service is running
7. Route request to the appropriate service or backend destination

It only needs to be deployed once to any WebSphere Datapower environment and requires no code changes to incorporate new services.

Introducing the Enterprise Framework Service Scenario
The purpose of this article is to describe the steps involve to create an Enterprise framework services in the Datapower.  For this article and demonstration purpose we will not be implementing any option for security and MQ. However, due to the nature of the framework these options can be added later.  Our version of the Enterprise Framework service will contain the following features:

1. Provide single point of entry for all services running inside the Datapower
2. Can handle requests over HTTP on port 81
3. Identify the client from the incoming request
4. Identify the environment where the service is running
5. Route request to the appropriate service or backend destination
6. It only needs to be deployed once to any WebSphere Datapower environment and requires no code changes to incorporate new services.