Achieving the “5 Nines” of Business

Continuity in SOA Applications

Jason Bloomberg
Senior Analyst
ZapThink, LLC

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 1

 Business Constant: Change

Changing
Marketplace
Customer
Competition Demands

Mergers & CHANGE Optimizing

Acquisitions Processes
Business
Partners
New
Technologies

A Business is Never STATIC

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 Business Agility

• Companies require Business Agility…

»Responding quickly to change,

and
»Leveraging change for
competitive advantage

Agility is the key to innovation

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J
 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

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 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
problem, we need a better way of organizing IT resources

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 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?
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 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

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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 level

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 Building Applications the Old
Way

Plan
Design

Develop

• Risky Test
• Time-consuming
Fix
• Expensive to maintain
Deploy
• Inflexible in the face of change
• Places limitations on the business Maintain
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 Building Applications the New Way

Lines of Service Model Existing

Business Infrastructure

Service Metadata

• 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

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 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
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 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

deprecation policies
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 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
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 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

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 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

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

Read our new book,

Service Orient or Be
Thank You! Doomed! How Service
Orientation Will Change
Your Business.

Jason Bloomberg
jbloomberg@zapthink.com

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 16