I’ve been reading a book on SOA architectures by Nicolai M. Josuttis which provides a very accessible introduction to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) design, benefits, and established best practices. One theme that keeps coming up is Collaboration, and in fact Nicolai states:
One key requirement for SOA is collaboration (pg 104).
The collaboration that Nicolai is talking about in the book is among isolated departments or business units within a company and is a key factor in ensuring the success of SOA (pg 104). This need to collaborate is a major driving force behind the decisions that need to be made to manage a SOA application.
Take the example of any company that has successfully impelemented a SOA based application. The company has overcome the inflexibility of large number of complex, distributed systems by creating a framework of services and processes that expose functionality to the consumers (users) of the application. This leaves the company with a number of services and processes that interact in a choreographed manner where no process has total control and all processes and services have limited knowledge of the over all application. These departments have given up some knowledge (and control) to be a part of a more flexible federated application (think about U.S History. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the states were basically asked to give up some of their influence and power to a centralized federal government. Some influence is gone but the resulting government is stronger and more flexible). Now there is a flexible (and scalable) infrastructure but there isn’t any unifying view of the application (other than the application itself but if you look at only the application you become ignorant to the components underneath).
In a SOA environment, monitoring of these services and processes is going to become more and more critical because of the limited scope of knowledge each department has. I think SOA based applications are still a relatively new concept that companies are experimenting with so there really hasn’t been any consideration as to how to ensure the performance of these applications and distribute the results to all interested/involved parties. What I suspect is that a need will arise (if it already hasn’t) for a platform in which all functional and non-functional requirements of a SOA base environment can be managed. I’ve heard that this isn’t even possible because of all the different ideas and methodologies for implementing SOA but it seems clear that some base framework that doesn’t contribute to the underlying architecture be present for management of the architectures requirements. What I’d really like to see is a platform that allows you to plug-in non-functional requirements (e.x. performance monitoring, SLA management, Business Process Management, etc.) as needed. A SOA management platform would help alleviate the pains that can occur when a company’s culture acts to resist collaboration. My experience with performance monitoring tells me that unless such a platform exists, there will never be widespread adoption of monitoring for SOA based applications.
