Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 1 Achieving the “5 Nines” of Business Continuity in SOA Applications Jason Bloomberg Senior Analyst ZapThink, LLC

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 2 Business Constant: Change CHANGE Competition Changing Marketplace Customer Demands Mergers & Acquisitions Optimizing Processes New Technologies Business Partners A Business is Never STATIC

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 3 Companies require Business Agility… »Responding quickly to change, and »Leveraging change for competitive advantage J Business Agility Agility is the key to innovation

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 4 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 5 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 6 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?

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 7 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 8 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 9 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 10 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 Existing Infrastructure Lines of Business

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 11 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 12 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 13 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 14 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 15 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

Copyright © 2006, ZapThink, LLC 16 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