Service-Oriented Architecture

Is SOA Expensive: Reality and the Myth?

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:31:47 +0000

Industry is adopting SOA more and more. CIOs are under tremendous pressure to show the value of SOA to the Business. Business is asking more and more questions about the benefit of SOA. To Business, SOA is too expensive and does not bring enough value to business early enough (long gestation period). So CIOs are asking several questions around SOA to the technology service providers in search of a convincing answer and one question keeps getting repeated ‘Is SOA expensive – if not how and why?’

There is no straight answer to this question. One could argue for both sides of the camps and still make conclusion on either way. Let’s see why SOA is considered to be expensive by the people who are not so close to IT. There are several factors why SOA is perceived to be expensive (I would say only ‘to begin with’). But, remember SOA is expensive at the ‘beginning’ as there are few upfront investments required on Software Licenses, Infrastructures, Training etc. The lists below are the key areas of investments:

Service Design: Making a component re-usable is typically 2.5 times more expensive as compared to having a piece of code which wouldn’t be re-used at all having the same functionality. This means when we create a Service we have to ensure that it’s going be re-used at least 3 times in the future.

Cloud Computing - Are We Ready Yet

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:20:07 +0000

by Animesh Ghosh

I recently visited CloudExpo London 2009 and had the opportunity to meet up with industry thought leaders, CxOs, architects, marketing gurus from the major players like Google, Amazon, Linux, IBM, Salesforce so on and so forth. This article is a synopsis of point of views (PoVs) from a number of sessions I attended during my visit.

So, why Cloud Computing (CC)? There was a general consensus among the people on the typical benefits of Cloud Computing.

Greater flexibility
Quicker changes and deployments
Optimising asset utilisation
Easing management overhead
End to end visibility of service delivery
Reduces Capex and Opex with very fast ROI
Greater control of infrastructure
Improved resilience and availability
Better DR capability

Composite Applications continues to make inroads

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:59:38 +0000

As I pointed out in an earlier blog http://www.infosysblogs.com/soa/2008/06/sca_java_ee_integration_spec_b.html, composite applications could also be understood as mechanism for enterprise application integration and come in various flavors basically differentiated on the tier at which the integration is taking place. JSR 168 and 286 (portlets and inter-portlet communication), enterprise mashups http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid), etc. are examples of integration happening at the presentation tier. COTS Enterprise Application (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, Mircrosoft, etc. came up with ready made composite applications and composite application development suites founded on the sound architectural principles of SOA. These represent integration at the business tier and employ process orchestration and enterprise messaging technologies.

Are you in a hurry to implement SOA?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:35:42 +0000

My experience with some of the enterprise clients in SOA space has been rather surprising. I find lots of these enterprises rushing to create a SOA roadmap and deploy a pilot SOA program. My trouble is not that they want to do it fast and want to have quick win but having it done at the cost of 'insufficient' understanding of what they want and why they want is my worry.

SOA in difficult times

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:32:42 +0000

Happenings in the recent weeks have turned many tables and raised many eyebrows. It has been a crash from fantasy to reality for many organizations in the need to make IT real, effective, cheaper, faster, cleaner. Organizations are in a hurry to get unproductive assets, esp Cap-ex, off the books.

This is a big change for suite vendors who have positioned their products to “capture” the solution space by selling software in an integrated package form, wherein many aspects aren't necessarily being utilized.

This is especially true in the case of SOA, where there is no hurry and sometime no need for components like registry, repository, accelerators, test suites and the like. These components unlike the ESB and messaging components, the WSDL, workflow and rules components may or may not be implemented. However, organizations who have bought suites already use infrastructure to run, monies to license, Op-ex (train and maintain) seemingly unused software.

Achieving an Evergreen Solution

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:18:57 +0000

- Murteza Salemi

In the IT industry, from time to time, we hear terms and notions that carry special meaning within the industry. Evergreen is one of them. One of the dictionary definitions of 'evergreen' is something that remains perennially fresh, interesting, or well liked. But what does evergreen solution or technology means within IT context?

Simply put evergreen can be translated to ever relevant. In other words, a solution that has the capabilities to sustain and adapt to changes, and to continue to re-innovate and evolve through service capabilities over time.

Ready for the SOA Journey: Check Your SOA Maturity

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:57:46 +0000

One of the fundamental things about SOA that every organisation needs to understand is where they stand today before starting the SOA journey. This would quickly give an overview of the organisations readiness and maturity for the SOA journey. Organisation should start finding out the answers for few basic questions:

Do you have enough buy-in from Business, IT and other key stakeholders and of course the right business case to adopt SOA?

Logging Approach for SOA

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:04:17 +0000

Generally, two kinds of logging are required in any business system, be it a SOA or not

Technical diagnostic logging e.g. logging exception trace
Logging business data e.g. logging for tracking/auditing purposes

The logging requirements may vary depending on the exact purpose. For exception logging, you may typically log details of the component, application platform, timestamp, infrastructure components and then details of the incident itself etc. Logging for auditing and business related reporting purposes would invariably require some amount of business data logging.

SOA on its way out? Lets get ready for future

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:29:35 +0000

http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1168&tag=nl.e539 (Debate Rages over SOA's cloudy future - by Joe McKendrick)

I stumbled upon this article while reading some articles. As I read it, I heard a 'click' sound in my brain :-). My previous post of SOA's future, I speculated about fading of SOA's strongly hypothetical personality and come of age of BPM driven IT solutions.

Making Your SOA Journey Successful – Key Aspects

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:34:21 +0000

Adoption of SOA is growing faster and faster. But whenever an organisation adopts new approach/framework/technologies, mistakes are likely, and SOA is no exception to this rule. I have been personally involved in quite a few big SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) initiatives. Keeping the trend of mistakes, organisations and I have experienced those and tried to rectify those in the subsequent ones and thus those become part of the best practice. Even though organisation starts with a big dream of SOA with Strategy, Roadmap, Value add to business etc etc, there are number of key important best practices to be followed which have been experienced by the industry, are above and beyond just having SOA Strategy and Roadmap at the beginning. So, it's very important that the experience of the early adopters of SOA is captured for the benefit of those who are planning to adopt SOA in the near future. Identification and documentation of all those processes / policies / technology / best practices that is most essential - will help enterprises avoid mistakes and successfully implement SOA. I have captured few of the processes / best practices which must be in place for adopting SOA in an enterprise.

Will Next generation XML Appliances propel XML and SOA into the Enterprise Mainstream?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:47:26 +0000

Intel has released some new numbers, as they noted in comments to an earlier blog entry. These are some highlights:

Decryption, Application of XACML policies, routing to different SOAP services: 1050 messages of 7.64 KB processed per second

Legacy to SOA Integration use case: 980 messages per second for a healthcare HL7 format messages

Mediation use case: 5184 messages per second, including validation, transformation, SOAP message generation.

What additional windows of opportunity do XML appliances of such speed open up?

Story of the main-stream SOA

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:42:49 +0000

I’m calling it a story since it is yet to happen…more ambitious word for this will be ‘vision’. But given that ‘SOA’ and ‘vision’ have been beaten to death in last couple of years so let me continue with the story only. Key word in the title really is not the ‘story’ though..it is the ‘main-stream’ and soon you will see why. One of things in SOA that make me sick is the ‘real-ness’ of it (or rather lack of it). I personally feel that SOA as a concept is running out of steam to remain in the ‘hot seat’. There isn’t much new or different coming out from it than what has been spoken about thousands time already in difference styles and with different jargons. For that matter, I think ERP as a concept has done far better where in journey from speculative vision to physical realization (what so ever it has been, that really doesn’t matter) has been rather fast and it did change the shape of the industry to large extent. With SOA, industry seem to going on and on and on but like everything else, SOA will run out of the fuel sooner or later. If industry doesn’t something new in SOA which is the next level of life with SOA, it will not sustain. Skeptics are already ignoring it, even believers might drop the ball after a while. So what do we envision beyond this?

Top 10 ways to Fake your way to the SOA-XML bandwagon

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:02:35 +0000

As a SOA Architect, I certainly do not approve this. But here are the top 10 ways you can "Fake your way to the SOA-XML bandwagon. "

In some companies SOA has been oversold, or may be premature. For example, Security and Fine Grained Entitlements are so critical in some financial institutions, that without this piece in place, it may be premature to talk about SOA. Or may be the data still exists in silos, making it impossible to construct meaningful useful services, that address the immediate business needs of the organization.

But if you are under pressure to be supportive of SOA and XML, here are some ways.

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture - Part III

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:14:09 +0000

Is it necessary to have an advanced and mature SOA Stack in order to have centralized security policy creation and enforcement? If a SOA Stack is not at a stage where Composite Applications are proliferating, is centralized security still required?

You need centralized security policy creation and enforcementet quite early in your SOA program. The first step in your SOA initiative will be to decide what level of granularity your services should be at. It is very easy to create webservices using built-in wizards found in many IDEs as well as wizards offered in products like databases and portals.

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture - Part II

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:28:23 +0000

Why do we need different Architectural Building Blocks to specifically address SOA Security? Should the best practice of “Independent Chain of Command” be part of SOA Reference Architecture?

These are some of the questions and comments, I have been asked in response to the first part of this series. SOA Security must handle the highly composite nature of today’s and emerging SOA Applications, and this ability to handle composite, frequently changing, dynamic applications is a critical requirement for managing security in SOA environment.

Maintaining Security Accountability in the context of composite applications that cut across IT business unit, Enterprise Application, databases is a key challenge for SOA Security.