Service-Oriented Architecture

by Animesh Ghosh

I recently visited CloudExpo London 2009 and had the opportunity to meet up with industry thought leaders, CxOs, architects, marketing gurus from the major players like Google, Amazon, Linux, IBM, Salesforce so on and so forth. This article is a synopsis of point of views (PoVs) from a number of sessions I attended during my visit.

So, why Cloud Computing (CC)? There was a general consensus among the people on the typical benefits of Cloud Computing.

• Greater flexibility
• Quicker changes and deployments
• Optimising asset utilisation
• Easing management overhead
• End to end visibility of service delivery
• Reduces Capex and Opex with very fast ROI
• Greater control of infrastructure
• Improved resilience and availability
• Better DR capability

Continue reading "Cloud Computing - Are We Ready Yet" »

Posted by Guest Author at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

- Murteza Salemi

In the IT industry, from time to time, we hear terms and notions that carry special meaning within the industry. Evergreen is one of them. One of the dictionary definitions of 'evergreen' is something that remains perennially fresh, interesting, or well liked. But what does evergreen solution or technology means within IT context?

Simply put evergreen can be translated to ever relevant. In other words, a solution that has the capabilities to sustain and adapt to changes, and to continue to re-innovate and evolve through service capabilities over time.

Continue reading "Achieving an Evergreen Solution" »

Posted by Guest Author at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SOA applicability is very dependent on an organization's environment. Recently I got into a discussion about "SOA in the small." Is it feasible? I think not. But IMHO elements of SOA can be applied to the organization to fit into an enterprise SOA roadmap

Continue reading "Service Oriented Elephant?" »

Posted by Ajit Sagar at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Eisenhower System was envisioned as a systematic, incrementally adoptable plan for surface transport for the United States, which has been in build and operation for around 50 years. It acts as the fundamental artery of passenger and goods transport across United States.

When we study the history and operation of the Eisenhower System (a.k.a The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways | http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/routefinder/), we will find many parallels to the information superhighway of the Enterprise, the Service Bus, such as

Continue reading "The new movie on the Eisenhower System of Enterprise IT i.e. ESB?" »

Posted by Binooj Purayath at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Cloud Computing - SOA Interlinkage: Is it enterprise Ready?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

SOA transformation is all very fine, but does is apply to all situations? For example, how do you apply SOA principles to organizations where the multitude of desktop users love the spreadsheet interface and swear by it? Perhaps a better question is, how should you apply SOA principles to environments where users are not looking to share information between desktops, where the ultimate flexibility of your own personal spreadsheet is inherently the differentiator between your product and your competition's, and where SOA is looked on as "Simply Over Ambitious?"

Continue reading "SOA-enablement of spreadsheets - is it feasible?" »

Posted by Ajit Sagar at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

In many enterprise IT organizations, there are separate teams those are focused on Enterprise Architecture (EA) vs. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). So many IT executives wonder the need of two separate entities. The usual questions are 1) does one replaces the other or are they complementary? 2) are there overlaps? 3) how to decide the boundary of responsibilities?

During a recent discussion, to answer these questions I used a parallel from my daughter’s toy room. I explained ‘EA is like a Jigsaw puzzle and SOA is like LEGO builds’.

Continue reading "The Jigsaw Puzzle and LEGO Toys of Enterprise IT" »

Posted by Binooj Purayath at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Web 2.0 - SOA interplay - emerging SOA governance trend" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Being privy to multiple SOA projects in different continents and stages gives some interesting insights. Technology is hardly a problem, but it is always mentioned. With so many intelligent people around, I have reasonable confidence in stating that if a problem can be identified it can be solved.

So, what are some the real problems:

• SOA changes the basic definition of roles
• Funding of SOA projects today and chargeback models

Continue reading "SOA on the fast track" »

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 06:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In some of my interactions with clients, discussions around SOA are met with diverse outcomes. They vary from

1. We have decided to have an enterprise-wide SOA. Can you help us build a strategy?
2. Help us get started by putting foundational components and work on a portfolio
3. We are not ready for SOA yet
4. Why do we need an ESB, UDDI, repository, registry? Suite vendors are asking us to buy stacks!
   

Continue reading "SOA Lite" »

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 04:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "SOA at the data level?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Service Orientation - Beyond integration and architecture" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 05:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Much has been made of hyped technology waves over the past few decades as the effectiveness of the technologies at the frontier of each wave. Is the current wave of SOA any different? Will SOA be able to bridge, if not obliterate the gap between business and IT? The real question is whether there is actual gap between the desired expectations and the delivered value of SOA?

Read on...

Continue reading "caveats in SOA adoption.." »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While there are definite advantages in terms of standardization and flexibility offered by XML based SOA infrastructures, crucial enterprise concerns in terms of performance and scalability are often the bottleneck to adopting XML based standards.

How to overcome the performance challenge of XML and verbose languages?

Can going native (working with low level network protocols) to absorb these new challenges help? The answer appears to be an emphatic YES.. Read on..

Continue reading "Is going native the answer to SOA performance?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

'SOA has created unexpected complexity' what caught my attention and reading through the article I hit upon another unexpected term -

‘The Ovum survey found a high correlation between a business' level of satisfaction with SOA and their commitment to managing IT as a set of services.’

Surprised! services being tagged with IT, services being abstracted to such a large extent (as my thoughts were channelized only on to SOA)... I continued reading and among examples was what I found - ITIL.  So it was about ITIL, a framework and set of best practices to be followed for IT management and operations. 

Continue reading "The new mantra in SOA Management" »

Posted by Naveen Kulkarni at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Architecting services from an enterprise perspective does not just involve identifying and fitting pieces together, but managing and addressing cross cutting concerns or non functional requirements (NFRs). We see lot of discussion on SOA being around abstracting the business functions as reuse-able services.  But what is still tabooed are the quality attributes that have to be associated with services to make them truly enterprise class. 

Conventional wisdom suggests that to achieve strategic approach to SOA, it is ideal that business centric nature of the Services be the guide to designing SOA.

 But the dichotomy of SOA realization is that services are realized  from existing systems, hence it necessarily mandates a role for bottom up approach to leverage legacy and EIS systems.

So it is top-down or bottom-up for SOA?

Continue reading "SOA: Top Down, Bottom Up or Hybrid?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Your company is in Fortune 500 or 5000; an Oil & Gas major with north of 200 billion in revenue or privately owned ‘niche’ with south of a billion in revenue, it does not matter. The question is the same: who will fund the SOA initiatives in the enterprise? 
 

The answer is simple: everybody and nobody.

Continue reading "Who pays the bill for enterprise SOA initiatives?" »

Posted by Binooj Purayath at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)