SOA Made Simple

Service registry and service repository

A service registry is used to describe processes, services, events, and important metadata. Consumers search a registry to find services they can use and retrieve information, such as the status of a service, the owner of a service, its endpoint location, and dependencies on other services. Registries can be compared to the yellow pages. Registries can be used at design-time for service discovery, but also at runtime for endpoint virtualization.

A service repository also stores artifacts of processes, services, and events such as WSDLs, XSDs, and other relevant documents.

The more mature and scaled-out an SOA gets and the more services you create and use, the more need there is to manage them using a registry ...