Centralized Configuration Store for E-Commerce Services
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current e-commerce systems face challenges in managing and maintaining configuration data for various business entities, as they become increasingly decentralized and inflexible, making it difficult to handle the growing needs of businesses requesting multiple services and frequent policy changes.
Innovation Solution
A central location is introduced to receive, store, and serve configuration information to service providers, allowing businesses to manage entity-specific configuration data while enabling service providers to regulate their own rules, using a Web service interface for updating configuration files and employing XML schema validation for syntactic and semantic validation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If services store configuration data locally for each business entity, then each service can maintain unique configuration requirements securely, but as commerce grows and more businesses request services, the services find it increasingly difficult to maintain and manage configuration information
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the configuration storage function into a centralized service provider system. Instead of each service storing configuration data locally, the service provider maintains a centralized configuration store that all services access. This consolidation reduces the overall complexity of managing configuration information across multiple services while maintaining security through centralized control and access management.
Solution Approach 2:
The service provider acts as an intermediary between businesses and services. The service provider receives configuration data from businesses, validates it against schema definitions, and then provides it to the appropriate services. This intermediary role simplifies the system by centralizing configuration management and reducing the burden on individual services to maintain their own configuration data.
2Reliability
If services store configuration data locally, then configuration data can be maintained securely for each business, but the current system is too inflexible and decentralized to handle further growth
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic configuration management where the service provider can receive, validate, and update configuration data in real-time. The system uses schema validation to ensure configuration data meets requirements while allowing businesses to update their configurations dynamically. This dynamic approach enables the system to adapt to growth and changing requirements while maintaining security through centralized control.
Solution Approach 2:
The service provider configuration management system serves multiple functions: it stores configuration data, validates it against schemas, manages updates, and provides data to multiple services. This universal configuration management approach handles diverse business requirements and service types through a single centralized system, enabling the platform to scale and adapt to growth.
3Adaptability or versatility
If businesses change configuration policies rapidly and request new services, then businesses can adapt to their evolving needs, but existing services find it ineffective to continue storing configuration data locally
Solution Approach 1:
The service provider performs preliminary validation of configuration data using schema definitions before the data is used by services. This preliminary action ensures that configuration changes are valid and meet requirements before they are applied, enabling businesses to change policies rapidly while maintaining system integrity. The schema validation occurs in advance, preventing invalid configurations from reaching the services.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques described herein provide a self-service, run-time configuration store for interaction between a business owner and a Web service. For instance, the techniques may receive entity-specific configuration data from a business entity, may validate and store the entity-specific configuration data in a central location, and may receive a service-specific schema definition from a Web service. In response to a command to push the validated configuration data, or in response to a request to pull the validated configuration data, the techniques serve the entity-specific configuration data to configure the Web service for use with customers of the business entity.