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Jyothi Swaroop

SOA governance initiatives help organizations optimize their service-oriented architecture (SOA) by providing a means to reduce risk, maintain business alignment and show the business value of SOA investments. But, all too often, these initiatives can be seen as daunting projects that are overly broad and complex, that require too many resources and that are too time consuming. In this article, Oracle's Jyothi Swaroop will explain how organizations can take an incremental approach to SOA governance initiatives to meet their specific needs. This will include an overview of how SOA governance technologies can support specific tactical level projects while ensuring the organization is able to optimize the entire lifecycle of its SOA. SOA has gained widespread adoption and has proven to be successful beyond pilot and project implementations. There is a rapid increase in organizations moving to enterprise-wide SOA deployments, and those that have found success maturing to large-scale SOA have two things in common. First, they have effective governance practices to keep SOA on track with the business and second, they take an incremental approach to their SOA and its governance initiatives to meet their specific needs. SOA has gained widespread adoption and has proven to be successful beyond pilot and project implementations. There is a rapid increase in organizations moving to enterprise-wide SOA deployments, and those that have found success maturing to large-scale SOA have two things in common. First, they have effective governance practices to keep SOA on track with the business and second, they take an incremental approach to their SOA and its governance initiatives to meet their specific needs...

Philip Wik

The enterprise service technology architect faces three challenges. The architect must model complicated existing systems and new service technology architectures (STA), promote STA to stake holders throughout the enterprise who vary widely in engagement, commitment, and knowledge, and realize the vision of that STA. Only three challenges? Of course, these are only a few of the many problems plague the architect. But most issues have their roots in coping with these for failure-inducing problems.When we design service technology architectures, we must accept that we have mental blinders. Consider, for example, the house cat. What is it? We could start by listing its properties: it's a small, furry, clean, carnivorous mammal attached to both places and people. Let's now say that we have an ideal definition that has all properties that give all of the necessary and the sufficient conditions to qualify as a cat. Have we defined a cat? Enterprise architects deal with semantics in the broadest sense, so the answer to this question is important. The answer is: no. The internal structure of a cat, its true essence or fundamental ontology, its "cattiness", may be hidden from us and await discovery or might exist but may never be discovered. This agnosticism should inform our drive to understand any system. We deal with entities such as cats and pencils and attributes such as whiskers and wood. But we must accept as a given that there are questions without answers and that a true understanding of any entity will elude us, as there are limits to thoughts and symbols. The cat and the pencil teach us that we must cope with unfathomable unknowns. But in this realm of mystery, we must act. And we do so with the help of frameworks...

Paul S Prueitt

An extension to complexity science has implications to our theory of computing, and to service computing. Natural complexity is seen to arise from cross-organizational scale emergence. Emergence is then seen as the aggregation of substructure. In biology, aggregated form meets function and often appears non-deterministic. Many functions are met with the same subset of substructural forms, and a single function may be met with several different subsets of these sub-structural forms. A set of selection mechanisms determines which elements are used to fulfill which functions. Real time selection provides robustness in service fulfillment. An application of these principles separates computing resources into framework-based substructure, which is then used to meet functional requirements. This provides a solid foundation for a new service computing technology as well as new science, based on knowledge about interactions between organizational layers. Computing in support of service fulfillment maybe optimized through a re-use paradigm based on observation, and the extraction of patterns. The patterns are then used to define process atoms. Organization scale hides specific use when composed process atoms fulfill service support requirements. New forms of information security are then available.The first step towards understanding this non-local feature is in the use of replication. Algorithms receive data from measurement processes. An isomorphism is designed to place a metric on the quality of models for observed phenomenon. But there is a requirement that all data be encoded into a small set of process atoms. And yet the composed service must...

Raj Balasubramanian, Benjamin Carlyle, Cesare Pautasso

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural model that aims to meet the goals of service-orientation. This model revolves around a service-orientation design paradigm and can consist of a combination of technologies, products, APIs, supporting infrastructure extensions and various other parts. SOA is defined in terms of principles rather than formal constraints. This means that often there is a trade off when choosing and applying the principles of service-orientation. The principles are not designed to permit formal reasoning about the properties of the architecture. The main elements of a service-oriented technology architecture are its services, contracts, compositions, and service inventories. Collections of services that are governed under the same processes are brought together into the same service inventory. Services have underlying capabilities that they express through their contracts, and may in turn implement those capabilities by invoking other services in compositions of varying complexity. A composition may be led either by an application-specific composition controller services, or directly by a service consumer to implement the specific business requirements of individual applications. A service composition is a coordinated aggregate of services. A composition of services is comparable to a traditional application in that its functional scope is usually associated with the automation of a business process. A composition may be executed or orchestrated either by an application-specific composition controller service, or directly by a service...