Release Notes: v1.0 (General Availability)

This document provides the comprehensive feature inventory for version 1.0, the first General Availability (GA) release of the SOAP-2-REST platform. This release delivers the complete platform for traffic-driven discovery, bidirectional SOAP↔REST conversion, OpenAPI v3 generation, and in-app observability.

Highlights

• Bidirectional Conversion: Provides both a REST facade for a SOAP backend (Publish) and a SOAP facade for a REST backend (Consume) on a single runtime.
• Deterministic Mapping: Generates a full-field mapping from a WSDL, with support for versioned snapshots and field-level overrides.
• Traffic-Driven Discovery: Discovers services from live traffic using connectors for various gateways and load balancers, or a generic HTTP receiver.
• Contract Generation: Creates OpenAPI v3 specifications for Publish services and serves a WSDL for Consume services.
• Integrated Observability: Includes dashboards, SLO reporting, searchable logs, live traffic inspection, and contract drift detection.
• Secure Deployment: Runs within your VPC with no public endpoint by default. Supports RBAC, various identity providers, and encrypts backend credentials.
• Internationalization: Supports UTF-8 end-to-end, including Hebrew and Right-to-Left (RTL) rendering.
• Licensing: Uses a platform license with a fail-open model for telemetry and a fail-closed model for entitlement after a grace period.

Conversion

The platform converts requests and responses between SOAP and REST/JSON. It supports two primary modes of operation on the same runtime.

Publish Mode (REST to SOAP)

In Publish mode, the platform exposes a REST/JSON interface that acts as a facade for a backend SOAP service. The published contract is an OpenAPI v3 document.

flowchart TD
    subgraph Publish Flow
        direction LR
        A[API Consumer] -- REST/JSON --> B(Platform REST Facade)
        B -- SOAP --> C[Backend SOAP Service]
        C -- SOAP --> B
        B -- REST/JSON --> A
    end

Consume Mode (SOAP to REST)

In Consume mode, the platform exposes a SOAP interface that proxies requests to a backend REST/JSON service. This is useful when migrating a legacy SOAP service to REST while maintaining compatibility for existing consumers. The platform serves back a WSDL at the Consume endpoint.

Outbound authentication to the REST backend supports:

• None
• Basic
• Bearer token
• OAuth2 client-credentials
• API key in a header
• Mutual TLS

flowchart TD
    subgraph Consume Flow
        direction LR
        A[SOAP Client] -- SOAP --> B(Platform SOAP Facade)
        B -- REST/JSON --> C[Backend REST Service]
        C -- REST/JSON --> B
        B -- SOAP --> A
    end

Conversion Capabilities

• SOAP Versions: Supports SOAP 1.1 and 1.2, automatically detecting the version from the request body and Content-Type header.
• WSDL Styles: Supports document/literal (wrapped and bare) and rpc/literal message styles.
• Mapping: Provides deterministic, full-field mapping from the WSDL/XSD. Mappings are versioned, immutable, and can be activated or rolled back. Field-level overrides can be configured via the UI.
• SOAP Headers: Allows per-operation injection of SOAP headers.
• Fault Handling: Normalizes SOAP faults into a deterministic REST error structure. WSDL-declared fault details are reflected in the generated OpenAPI schema.

Conversion Options

The platform provides a catalog of tunable behaviors that can be set globally and overridden per service, operation, or field.

Multi-Backend and Resilience

• Routing: Supports routing to multiple backends for a single service, with failover capabilities.
• Health Checks: Actively monitors the health of backend services.
• Timeouts and Retries: Configurable per-operation timeout (default: 100 ms) and retries (default: 2) with bounded failure behavior.
• Payload Size Limit: Enforces a 30 MB synchronous payload ceiling and rejects larger requests with a specific error.
• Transport Settings: Allows configuration of SOAP transport settings on a per-backend basis.

OpenAPI v3 Generation

For services in Publish mode, the platform generates a standards-compliant OpenAPI v3 document.

• The generated schema reflects the configured conversion options and validation rules.
• WSDL-declared faults are translated into per-operation fault schemas in the OpenAPI document.

Discovery and Onboarding

• Traffic-Driven Discovery: Discovers services by analyzing live traffic from connected gateways and load balancers. The discovery view shows request counts over 24-hour, 7-day, and 1-month periods, loaded from pre-computed aggregation tables for fast performance.
• Consumer Attribution: Identifies consumers by resolving forwarded headers such as X-Client-IP, X-Forwarded-For, and Forwarded.
• WSDL Onboarding: A wizard allows importing a WSDL via file upload, URL, or pasted XML. It suggests settings for the backend endpoint, SOAP version, and authentication based on the WSDL content.
• Autopilot: A one-step process to generate a draft service, operations, and mappings, including a readiness score for each operation.
• Change Detection: When re-importing a WSDL, the platform detects breaking changes, added or removed operations, and provides a per-operation delta.
• Namespace Repair: Includes functionality to fix common issues in broken WSDLs.
• Learned Examples: Captures real request/response payloads and headers from production traffic, curating them as examples for each service and operation.

Connectors

The platform includes pre-built connectors for traffic discovery and ingest.

• Load Balancers: F5 BIG-IP, Citrix NetScaler/ADC, HAProxy, nginx, Kemp LoadMaster, A10 Thunder ADC, Radware Alteon.
• API Gateways: IBM DataPower, CA/Broadcom Layer7, Software AG/IBM webMethods, Perforce Akana, TIBCO Mashery, Oracle API Gateway.
• Generic HTTP Receiver: A universal ingest endpoint with per-vendor parsers and a dead-letter queue for any source that can emit HTTP traffic logs.

Observability

• Operations Dashboard: Provides Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tiles, timeline charts, and per-service rollups.
• SLO Reports: Tracks Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for availability and latency, with breach detection.
• Searchable Logs: Runtime logs are searchable and keyed by correlation ID, result code, environment, service, and operation.
• Live Traffic: A log of live traffic with full request/response payloads and headers for detailed analysis.
• Contract Drift Detection: Monitors backend responses for deviations from the expected contract.
• Asynchronous Callback Tracking: Tracks the lifecycle and timing of asynchronous callbacks, with options to replay, manually reprocess, and detect overdue callbacks.
• Performance: Time-bucketed data is read from pre-computed aggregation tables to ensure dashboards and reports load quickly.
• Retention: Log and metric data is retained for 60 days by default, and this period is configurable.

Security

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Defines admin, operator, and reader roles. Roles can be mapped from IdP groups, assigned directly to principals, or managed via an emergency bootstrap list.
• Identity Management: Integrates with Google IAP, Azure AD, and standard SAML/OIDC providers.
• Network Security: Deploys with no public endpoint by default, ensuring internal-only networking.
• Credential Management: Encrypts backend credentials using pgcrypto. Credentials are never logged or returned in plaintext. On Google Cloud, IAM database authentication is supported.
• Audit Trail: Maintains a full audit trail of all actions, recording the actor, role, action, and before/after state.
• Correlation IDs: Injects correlation IDs to trace a request through its entire lifecycle.

Licensing

• Verification: Licenses are RS256-signed JWTs verified via JWKS. The license is re-verified periodically.
• Grace Period: An offline grace period of 14 days is provided before the platform enters a degraded (read-only) mode.
• Capacity: Licensing is based on the number of discovered services and active (converted) services, measured over a rolling window.
• Failure Modes: Telemetry outages do not disrupt traffic (fail-open). An invalid or expired license disables licensed write operations only after the grace period expires (fail-closed).
• Telemetry Data: Outbound telemetry includes only numeric counts, versions, a hashed host fingerprint, an installation ID, a customer label, and a contact email. It does not include PII, payloads, or hostnames.

Deployment

The platform can be deployed in various environments:

• Google Cloud: A native deployment using Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL with IAM DB Auth), Cloud Storage, and Cloud IAP. Also available via the GCP Marketplace.
• Kubernetes / OpenShift: Deployed via a Helm chart.
• Standalone: A Docker Compose stack is provided for running the control plane, runtime, worker, and PostgreSQL.
• Cloud Abstraction: A cloud-adapter abstraction layer is available for object storage, compute, and secret management, with implementations for Google Cloud, Azure, and VMware. Sample Terraform environments are provided for AWS, Azure, and a vSphere relay.

Known Limitations in v1.0

The following are not included in the standard v1.0 product:

• RPC/Encoded Messages: Only document/literal and rpc/literal SOAP message styles are supported. SOAP encoding (rpc/encoded) is not supported.
• WS-Security: Message-level signing and encryption on the inbound SOAP path (Consume mode) is not supported. Outbound REST authentication methods, including mTLS, are supported.
• Non-HTTP Transports: The platform supports HTTP/HTTPS only. Transports like message queues or SFTP are not supported.
• Air-Gapped Operation: The platform requires outbound HTTPS connectivity for licensing and updates. A 14-day offline grace period is supported.
• Native Cloud Ports: VM appliance images and first-class native integrations for AWS, Azure, and Oracle are not included. Sample Terraform for AWS, Azure, and vSphere is available.
• Additional Integrations: Support for identity providers like Okta and Keycloak, and dedicated connectors for modern API management platforms are not included. The generic-HTTP receiver can be used as a workaround for the latter.

Upgrading

This is the inaugural GA release. There is no prior version to upgrade from.

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