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Cyrille Thilloy

This article is the first in a series exploring the various technologies and options available to an enterprise when establishing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) roadmap. It introduces the notion of an SOA infrastructure and enriches it with the models and frameworks currently available to SOA implementers. By describing architectural components and frameworks common to SOA, it defines the baseline for the service-oriented enterprise. Subsequent articles will further explore a possible methodology for SOA governance based on the formal description of the purpose of each service. This methodology provides diagrams and template examples of inputs and outputs on the decision paths needed for SOA adoption and roadmaps. In order to keep or gain a competitive advantage, organizations need to deliver richer business solutions, faster and at lower costs. Historically, enterprises have implemented silos of solutions embedding informal expertise that served specific business domains with very little reuse and almost no integration capabilities. The limitations of those architectures are now more fully understood. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining more ...

Satadru Roy

A services development platform such as a Web services runtime stack or an application server may no longer be enough to support the complex infrastructure requirements of a services ecosystem, such as mediation, orchestration, policy-based security enforcement, and services management. However, not all IT organizations have the need to meet all of these requirements. Careful analysis is necessary before decisions are made to invest in expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially as vendors continue to release a wide array of products often with confusing overlap in functionality and features, each claiming to act as an 'SOA-enabler'. This is the first of a four-part series in which we'll examine the most common SOA infrastructure requirements, their various degrees of complexity and how organizations can take an incremental approach towards SOA infrastructure software adoption. We begin by covering two categories of SOA infrastructure requirements, mediation and orchestration...

Nitin Gandhi

It's been well documented how service-oriented architecture (SOA) can help organizations achieve strategic benefits that can ultimately result in streamlined IT environments and increased profit margins. However, to successfully carry out the process of incorporating SOA into an organizational environment requires that various IT groups be coordinated in an effort to adopt SOA in a standardized manner. This is where accepted practices become useful. This article provides a master list of common practices, field proven by a number of SOA projects. Also supplied is a template that can be used as a checklist for developing SOA implementation roadmaps specific to an organization's transition project requirements. Although SOA is an accepted means of organizing automation logic in such a manner that it fosters reuse, growth, and interoperability throughout the evolutionary cycles of an enterprise, it is not itself a solution to domain specific problems. By applying practices, we address the unique considerations that come into play when having to phase service-orientation into enterprise domains...