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Building the Well-intentioned SOA
Infravio has released a white paper with guidelines for building what it describes as an “intentional SOA.” The papers describes architectural requirements and standards for building out an SOA, including SOA design-time and runtime components.
With the emergence of robust Web services standards, expensive and customized point-to-point integration has become a thing of the past, Infavio says. Organizations are increasingly turning to SOAs to reduce integration cost and risk and to increase asset reuse and business agility. Some organizations are looking to SOA for policy management for compliance and corporate governance initiatives.
The design of Web services applications is distinct from the design of an SOA. While Web services development is iterative and organizations can enable their applications one at a time, organizations need to deliberately design their SOA in a way that is comprehensive, Infavio says. Ad hoc collections of services strung together do not solve the problems an SOA is created to address but are expensive, customized, IT-intensive point solutions with no hope of reuse and no coherent platform from which to build composite applications.
The company provides in its white paper a list of 10 questions to ask before building an SOA:
1. How will you select standards for use in your enterprise?
2. How will you test to ensure that deployed services are compliant
with those standards?
3. How many Web services do you have in your company?
4. How will users discover available services and ensure reuse?
5. What IT processes will you need for versions, dependencies and
change management of services?
6. How do you manage provisioning and service level agreements for
internal and external users?
7. How quickly can you integrate and on-ramp new customers to your
IT systems?
8. What types of users and usage will be permitted, and who will
approve normal usage?
9. How do we track and enforce compliance with enterprise and
regulatory standards?
10. Who will approve the publishing of a service internally?
Externally?
The 37-page white paper, "Intentional SOA for Real-World SOA Builders," is available by calling at (408) 561-8689, or by e-mailing [email protected].