The EmpowerID Identity Management Framework is built on the concept of a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). As such, EmpowerID functionality is broken down into a large number of granular "jobs," which are hosted and run in Windows services that communicate back to the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse over WCF Web services. Jobs are either specific tasks that run on a scheduled basis (such as Inventory) or they are WCF Web Services used in workflow processes (such as the Exchange Management Host, which is called when performing Exchange management tasks using PowerShell). All Jobs can run on more than one server at a time for load-balancing and fail-over, with each server sending a periodic heartbeat to the Identity Warehouse specifying whether the server is online online and which Jobs it is hosting. If a server hosting a specific service moves offline for maintenance or other reasons, EmpowerID moves those processes to another server hosting the same Job.
As all communication occurs over WCF, the EmpowerID Web server plays an important role, directing the various calls that occur in EmpowerID—whether those calls are automated processes like attribute flow or user-initiated processes like logging in to the EmpowerID Web application—to the appropriate EmpowerID Windows service responsible for carrying out the call. To ensure this process flows without interruption, the EmpowerID Web server uses the following criteria to determine which Workflow server it uses:
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