eBook
SOA Architecture & Infrastructure:
Working with basic building blocks of SOA infrastructure
Today's SOA infrastructure elements include the application server, messaging middleware, the enterprise service bus (ESB), the business process management (BPM) server, the complex event processor (CEP), the SOA gateway appliance and the SOA registry/repository, and more.
This eBook reveals how building a SOA infrastructure for the cloud requires a truly service-oriented approach and a thorough
understanding of the value of services. Explore why the diversity of packaged and custom applications in a corporation tends to require a SOA plan that works with standardized business objects. Uncover how some advanced enterprise architects are taking a new view on SOA infrastructure.
Sponsored By:
eBook
SOA Architecture & Infrastructure:
Working with basic building blocks of SOA infrastructure
Table of Contents
Architecting SOA in the age of cloud infrastructure
SOA Patterns: Gartner's Pezzini on standardized business objects Gartner Analyst: Rethink the application paradigm - consider business capabilities
Resources from Talend
Architecting SOA in the age of cloud infrastructure
Creating an SOA infrastructure for the cloud is a far different challenge than that presented by traditional IT architectures. No surprises there. But which architectural aspects are most important in defining, modeling, and designing the new SOA infrastructure?
Dr. Chris Harding, Forum Director at The Open Group, says there are two basic vantage points on cloud architecture – that of the cloud supplier and that of the cloud user.
The cloud supplier must determine how to organize its systems to deliver a good cloud service. They must be concerned with things like optimizing the way that different users from the same enterprise actually use the same system. They must also optimize their virtual environment. “Since you are presumably in the cloud business, whether public or private, to make a profit, you can’t afford to have masses of systems that are idle; you want to optimize the use of those systems and appropriately design your virtual
environment,” he says.
The other vantage point is that of the enterprises that will use cloud services. Here the options are dizzying. You could use various software-as-a-service (SaaS) sources to meet your applications needs or use a cloud platform to house your own applications. You could also use cloud infrastructure to run both the operating system and the applications. You could have your enterprise IT in the cloud or run some of it in the cloud and some of it onsite.
Each of these options or combinations of options presents its own set of challenges. “It is an extension of the kinds of architectural problems that enterprises already have and discuss within The Open Group,” says Harding.
Service-orientation at work
For Michael Bell, the founder of Methodologies Corporation, a service-oriented architecture modeling firm, based in New Jersey, cloud computing clearly represents the service-oriented
era, which has begun in the past decade and is an outgrowth of SOA best practices and standards.
Bell says the term “service” has had a major influence on driving new business initiatives, and galvanizing the development of innovative technologies, such as enterprise service bus (ESB), gateways, and adapters. “Unfortunately, many organizations have not yet
recognized the term “service” as the chief contributor to business growth and the rise of institutional productivity,” says Bell. In fact, he suggests, the shift from object-oriented to service-oriented technologies represents a quantum leap in a company’s ability to adapt to change.
Bell says the core success of the cloud computing paradigm is affiliated with service
virtualization. So the term “service” is not only affiliated with business imperatives, it is also a dominant part of today’s IT terminology. “Services drive enterprise architecture and application architecture initiatives. A service embodies business processes and yet represents a major change in the way we think about technology,” says Bell.
In addition, Bell notes that the term “service” has had a major influence on driving new business initiatives, and galvanizing the development of innovative technologies, such as the ESB, gateways, and adapters.
Indeed, Harding says the ESB is one of the most important specific components that designers can use in their enterprise architecture. Harding says that only a few years ago many people were questioning whether an ESB was essential to SOA. “In theory, the answer was no but in fact it does seem to be a very useful device and yes, I think it will be an important aspect of SOA-Cloud architecture going forward,” says Harding. Still, he says, there are a number of questions to be resolved as to how that will be done.
Cloud computing is really just starting to take off and in the year ahead I think we will see people trying a lot of different things, he adds.
For those wishing to be “cloud ready,” Harding suggests starting with adoption of SOA architecture and then moving on to develop a clear understanding of all the different
“It might be wise to do a pilot project right away but if you are planning to make it part of your architecture right off, you are putting a big part of your business at risk,” says
Harding. What’s more, he notes, it is wise to continue to revisit your ROI expectations. “You can’t just assume that cloud is wonderful, you must calculate what it will cost,” he says.
SOA Patterns: Gartner's Pezzini on standardized business objects
SOA has been around for a few years, but there is always, it seems, a 'first implementer' somewhere. There is a natural tendency among some such implementers to make up for lost ground – to jump quickly and all out on a complex SOA. That is tempting, but, depending on organization culture, it could very well be the wrong path.
At Gartner AAII last fall, a session led by Gartner Analyst Massimo Pezzini, looked at SOA practices that are both cutting edge and established. In the interests of baseline setting, today we will look at one of those fairly well established SOA patterns that, while advanced in some ways, may be a less risky proposition than, say, a service integration pattern that makes use of emerging cloud computing technology.
Whether it is basic or advanced, each SOA initiative is unique, cautions Pezzini. It reflects business priorities and management practices … and therefore implements a technology infrastructure or a governance process that can vary even among organizations of roughly the same size, industry and geography.
Today's "guest pattern" is the standardized business objects pattern.
Pezzini said SOA implementers quickly find that the diversity of packaged and custom applications in a corporation tends to require a SOA plan that works with standardized business objects. He notes that Master Data Management techniques are often needed, but can entail significant complexity.
SOA project leaders may instead attempt to deal with the daunting heterogeneity of data models by defining canonical message formats, or business objects. The benefits of taking this approach are service reuse, reduced integration costs and limited vendor lock-in. But there are drawbacks.
Even the "canonical route" can require significant upfront design efforts, and thus, increased upfront costs. As we have seen over the years the violent or tortured corporate scrum that drags on in many MDM project rooms can have a counterpart in corporate business object design sessions.
With business object standardization, "the drawback is there is a different design effort which of course requires more time and increases your upfront cost. We know it is very difficult to justify high upfront effort," Pezzini told the AAII Summit attendees.
"Trying to define all the business objects can be very expensive. So, you should focus only on the top 10 to 15 business objects, and look to adopt industry standards when possible,"
he said.
Pezzini noted the difficulty often found in talking about SOA. He credited that to the fact that SOA has come to mean different things to different people. The patterns he outlines are intended to create a common ground for talking about SOA.
The patterns of SOA he describes based on his research run on a spectrum that ranges from the established standard business object development pattern to the latest design patterns of cloud-enabled SOA, elastically scalable SOA and SOA marketplaces (somewhat akin to 'app stores' for corporate software services).
Gartner Analyst: Rethink the application paradigm - consider business capabilities
The application platforms we are dealing with today encourage outdated software design processes. A better way for development managers to think is in terms of deploying capabilities to a particular environment that has the ability to interact with other capabilities. This eliminates the artificial walls between applications. It may, in fact, for some advanced enterprise architects, represent a new view on SOA infrastructure.
That is at least one take away from a discussion with Kirk Knoernschild, a research director with Gartner Group. Enterprises are beginning to uncover a fundamental mismatch
between the way code is developed and the business value of the development process, argues Knoernschild. “We have taken this notion of an application that runs in its own process that we are accustomed on the desktop and essentially carried that over into the notion of an app on a server,” he explained.
“Why do we even need the notion of an application on the Web?” asked Knoernschild. “It is an artificial notion that constrains how we go about building, deploying and managing software. Instead of application, we need to think in terms of business capabilities, the business process and business activities. “
A significant contributing factor to this disconnect lies in the way in which new code is funded. The challenge is that this process has developed a monolithic application mentality, which makes it easy to add too many competing elements to the finished product. He noted,
“Before we know it, we are left with application bloat. We have this all of these applications and some do the same thing, while others are unique.”
The source of the problem is caused by thinking about the development process in terms of applications rather than metrics which are meaningful to the business. Thinking about code in terms of application focuses the attention on metrics like project cost and time to code, which detract the focus from more significant metrics that relate to the end product.
Traditionally IT focuses on IT metrics like cost, time to market, and the number of defects, code quality and test coverage. Perhaps those types of metrics are useful for assessing how streamlined the development process is – but there are other values to consider.
Organizations also have to look at the value their software provides to the business after it is developed. Just because it cost $2 million to deliver a project that is on time and on budget, does not mean the system provides the value the organization needs.
Knoernschild said, “Understanding the business value is also very important, and that is an area where a lot of organizations tend to fall short. That can come in a variety of forms such as worker productivity, customer satisfaction, and retention.”
Resources from Talend
Talend Open Source ESB Download
White paper: Top 10 Reasons to Choose an Open Source Application Integration Solution
About Talend
Talend is the recognized market leader in open source data management & application integration. Talend democratizes application integration by providing open source solutions to address any integration challenge – from simple departmental projects to complex, heterogeneous IT environments.
Talend application integration solutions – powered by leading Apache open source projects Apache CXF, Apache Camel and Apache ActiveMQ – allow organizations to easily integrate and expand systems and applications with minimal upfront investment.
Unlike proprietary, closed solutions, which can only be afforded by the largest organizations, Talend makes middleware solutions available to organizations of all sizes, for all integration needs.
