copyright © 2006, zapthink, llc 1 achieving the “5 nines” of business continuity in soa...

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 1

Achieving the “5 Nines” of Business Continuity in SOA Applications

Jason BloombergSenior AnalystZapThink, LLC


Business Constant: Change

CHANGE

CompetitionCompetition

Changing Changing MarketplaceMarketplace

CustomeCustomer r DemandsDemands

Mergers & Mergers & AcquisitionsAcquisitions

Optimizing Optimizing ProcessesProcesses

New New TechnologieTechnologiess

Business Business PartnersPartners

A Business is Never A Business is Never STATICSTATIC


• Companies require Business Agility…

»Responding quickly to change, and

»Leveraging change for competitive advantage

J

Business Agility

Agility is the key to innovationAgility is the key to innovation


Service Orientation:Light at the End of the Tunnel

• Service Orientation is a business approach• It’s not about connecting things, it’s about enabling

processes• The core business motivation is business agility


How to Think Service-Oriented

• Service-Orientation is about change• IT must respond to change and enable innovation

Rather than simply throwing more software & iron at the Rather than simply throwing more software & iron at the problem, we need a better way of organizing IT resourcesproblem, we need a better way of organizing IT resources


How do you manage change?

• SOA is all about continual and sometimes unpredictable change

• Development issues

– How to handle versioning?

– How to handle metadata management?

– How to develop changing policies?

• Runtime issues

– Service availability

– Policy enforcement

– Guarantee Service-level agreement

– Maintain low TCO

How do you maintain continuous quality?How do you maintain continuous quality?


Building for ongoing change:The Death of the SDLC

• Traditional Distributed Software Development– “Waterfall” – Gather requirements,

design, develop, test, deploy as separate steps

– Works great when things don’t change– But, over time, usually fails to meet

ongoing business requirements• What if things are never “done”?

– Need Iterative approaches– Same order, with overlapping cycles– Better, but still assumes project

completion• SOA – applications are never complete,

Services are always in flux– Traditional SDLC wholly inadequate


The Agile SOA Lifecycle

• Agile architectures demand agile development approaches

• The Agile Manifesto:– Working software over documentation– People over programming– Begin with metadata

• Agile SOA:– Iterate between architecture and

implementation– The business drives the applications– Contract-first development

Software lifecycle at the Service levelSoftware lifecycle at the Service level


Building Applications the Old Way

Deploy

Test

Develop

Design

Maintain

Plan

Fix

• Risky• Time-consuming• Expensive to maintain• Inflexible in the face of change• Places limitations on the business


Building Applications the New Way

• Lines of business should work with metadata — no IT involvement

• Services go thru individual lifecycles – development, test, production, revision

• Service development driven by Service contracts• Must support variety of consuming applications

Service Model

Service Metadata

ExistingInfrastructure

Lines ofBusiness


Flexibility, Empowerment & Control

• The old way: IT management maintains control, doles out limited capabilities to users

• The Service-Oriented way: IT empowers a wide range of business users to build and manage SOBAs

• Risk: business users will really muck things up!

• Solution: SOA governance – business user empowerment in the context of policy-based control


Handling Service Versioning

• New requirements may involve only process configuration changes

• Services may support multiple contracts

• New requirement may require new contract

• Policy drives version selection & deprecation

Service consumers must support Service consumers must support deprecation policiesdeprecation policies


SOA Quality Assurance

• First level – Web Service testing– Test Service consumers and providers

to ensure proper exchange of messages– Performance test to ensure scalability

and reliability

• Second level – integration/dependency testing– Ensure composite apps work properly– Test underlying infrastructure

• Third level – metadata testing– Test ability to change contracts, policies, SOBA logic


The Challenge of SOA Testing

• Impossible to create realistic QA environment– Metadata configuration differences too

prevalent and too dynamic

• Necessary to test in production environment– Services must support test

messages– Quality assurance processes must

be part of governance framework


Service Lifecycle Governance and Quality

• Connect design time to runtime

• Quality a never-ending goal

• Quality – much more than being bug-free– Meets business requirements as those

requirements continue to change– Meets Service levels and other policies as those

policies change

The agility requirement for SOA vastly The agility requirement for SOA vastly complicates the quality challengecomplicates the quality challenge


Thank You!

ZapThink is an advisory, analysis, & influence firm focused exclusively on Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services, & XML.

Read our new book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business.

Jason Bloomberg

[email protected]

copyright © 2006, zapthink, llc 1 achieving the “5 nines” of business continuity in soa...

Documents

business agility slide

service level slide

change change competition

business constant

business approach

ongoing change

innovation slide

service contracts