ESP WEB_SERV is End of Support on agent version 12.1.1 and above

Products

• ESP Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

Web Services SOAP RPC job type is no longer supported from 12.1 so the WEB_SERV job fails. I understand we can upgrade to R12 and all should be fine but my question is how to handle this going forward beyond R12.  

Environment

Release :

Resolution

The reason support was dropped is that the SOAP RPC open source library (Axis) used had vulnerabilities that were not being addressed.

The SOAP protocol is very old, with RPC being the oldest. In all likelihood, any SOAP RPC services were rewritten as SOAP Document-Literal or REST by now.

If a customer is running any SOAP RPC web services, they should have the same concerns about vulnerabilities we do and should be looking to eliminate them. If they have the need to continue running SOAP RPC web services, they should keep an agent running at the 12.0 release to allow that.

Additional Information

The WEB_SERV WOB type only supported the SOAP RPC protocol. This was enabled by the agent's web services plugin. It's not very obvious, but if you look at the Agent documentation, it lists the two web services types it supports: RPC/Encoded and Document/Literal. They correspond respectively to the ESP WEB_SERV and WEB_DOCLIT WOB types.

Following is the agent documentation link:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/intelligent-automation/workload-automation-agent-for-web-services/12-1/getting-started.html