Step toward Service Oriented Architecture with the best practices of IBM's SOA Lifecycle
from CCR2, Issue 3 - 2006
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By Rick Thomas
Program Director for System z Software
IBM WebSphere
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This is the first in a continuing series of SOA articles for CCR2 explaining how you can follow IBM's SOA Lifecycle approach of best practices to help you maximize your success and the value your business gains from SOA.
In today’s global economy, you can’t afford to have frequently-changing business processes impede customer wins and revenue growth. Line-of-business managers need your IT department’s support to react quickly to business dynamics and longer-term changes, such as compliance with new government regulations. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) prepares IT to be flexible, relevant and supremely responsive to anything thrown its way, so business profits—and your IT department—can shine.
SOA is an evolution of what IT management and companies like IBM have been driving toward for a long time: a better and more standard way to achieve business responsiveness through easier and more flexible application integration. As a business process evolves to meet changing circumstances, a company will usually reuse its subprocesses to ensure reliability—it is rare for a business to scrap a process entirely and start from scratch. Similarly, cost-effective IT shops reuse system elements as new projects are launched and old ones are retooled. SOA enables this reuse.
At its heart, SOA is a simple concept; but it is new to a lot of companies, and there are things you can do—like following IBM’s SOA Lifecycle approach—that can dramatically increase the success and value your business gains from your implementation.
It’s about IT flexibility
With SOA, different computers with different programs from different functional areas of a business—or externally from customers, partners, suppliers or vendors—can smoothly exchange data with each other. Communication relies on open, cross-platform standards including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
SOA standardizes the movement of information between applications based on business rules. It treats Web services as common currency units that can be freely traded between composite applications—so the same function can be used in any application, no matter what its platform. As a result, you can meld the user-interface potential of Web and Java-based processing with business logic written in COBOL and PL/1 to reduce the time, cost and risk of your integration projects.
And while SOA can be designed for most computing systems, distributed or centralized, the IBM System z hardware you have right now holds highly valuable business logic, data and the built-in reliability, scalability, and availability that is essential for a successful SOA implementation.
It’s here today
SOA is the most important software technology and architecture to emerge to industry-wide prominence since the Internet, according to analyst firm Software Strategies (SOA Takes Off – New WebSphere SOA Foundation Extends IBM’s Lead with New System z9 Mainframes as
the Hub of the Enterprise, November 2005). Vendors, customers, and the business and regulatory climate are driving companies to adopt SOA.
SOA has become the preferred model among major IT vendors, including IBM, Microsoft®, Siebel and Oracle. For example, Microsoft supports Web services and defines common repository formats for storing Web services locations and definitions. IBM works with Microsoft and industry consortiums to define XML and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) standards, which define what a Web service does.
It’s here today, as evidenced by this quote: "Leading analysts are all forecasting rapid global adoption of the SOA model by enterprise IT users as its benefits become more widely understood, and now that the middleware, software tools, standards, best practices and methods needed have matured and become available. For example, by 2008 SOA will provide the basis for 80% of new development projects, according to Gartner". (SOA Takes Off – New WebSphere SOA Foundation Extends IBM’s Lead with New System z9 Mainframes as
the Hub of the Enterprise, Software Strategies, November 2005).
In addition, the regulatory climate requires information transparency and security. SOA enables easier business process tracking, management and auditing by revealing transaction paths, such as those that Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to report on. IBM is working to further enhance IT reporting capabilities with process management products and technologies in development.
The life cycle approach: model, assemble, deploy and manage
At a high level, deploying an SOA sounds straightforward—you essentially put XML Web services interfaces in front of existing applications, transactions, and databases or in front of new WebSphere or .NET applications. In reality, it’s essential to start with the appropriate tools to build a well-thought-out suite of Web services, to deploy them as composite applications, and to manage them to the highest service levels.
IBM recommends that you manage your project through a process called the SOA Lifecycle, which uses a proven methodical approach from modeling and assembling, to deploying and monitoring.
Model: The Model phase of the SOA Lifecycle process starts with discovering which program assets you have that you can reuse in new applications. You can more easily discover these hidden assets and determine which programs are good candidates for reuse in Web applications with IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer.
Once you understand what business operations you have coded and available, you’ll need to create end-to-end process models that represent key business processes throughout the enterprise. IBM WebSphere Business Modeler offers business modeling, simulation, analysis, and collaboration capabilities. The models it helps you build can direct subsequent steps in the SOA Lifecycle—Assemble and Deploy. Also available are tools, such as IBM CICS Interdependency Analyzer and IBM Asset Transformation Workbench, that can help you reuse your existing applications by providing valuable information about runtime behavior of your core applications, so you can restructure them into more manageable segments.
At the end of the modeling phase, you should have a clear inventory of assets and where they can be used in the business processes that you have modeled.
Assemble: The Assemble phase is where programs are wrapped as services and used to create composite applications, which piece together core assets that often span multiple platforms. If you use CICS, IMS or WebSphere transactional environments, the tools simplify the development of new Web user interfaces, traditional terminal interfaces and back-end business logic. IBM tools that can help make composite application development faster and more efficient include IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, IBM WebSphere Developer for System z, enterprise COBOL and PL/I compilers, and various problem determination tools.
When you’re happy with your composite application, then you are ready for deployment.
Deploy: During the Deploy phase, you integrate the new assets with the existing people, processes, and information assets you already use to run the business. Maintaining quality of service (QOS) and ensuring that the process runs efficiently and systems receive the information they need to complete their actions are essential to this stage of the SOA life cycle.
To help streamline process implementation, IBM offers the WebSphere Process Server to help control the execution of all your Web services created in the previous steps. It deploys the composite applications and controls the execution of the process, choreographing the individual programs in the process into an automated flow.
Also helpful is the IBM WebSphere Message Broker, which provides an advanced enterprise service bus (ESB) to handle connectivity to any application, whether standards-based or not. This means that you can choreograph any application through WebSphere Process Server, even those not standardized to Web services, which is especially useful if you have a large base of trusted applications. An advanced ESB can mediate and transform messages in flight to meet the needs of the receiving applications, and offload the mediation processing to an IBM System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) for faster, cost-efficient processing
Other tools that can help you deploy SOA applications include:
Manage: Once deployed, you’ll need to continue to secure, manage and monitor the composite applications and underlying resources from both an IT and a business perspective to get full value from your SOA. Information gathered during the Manage phase on key SOA indicators can provide real-time insight into business processes, enabling you to make better business decisions and feeding information back into the SOA life cycle for continuous process improvement.
To gain a bird’s eye view of the impact IT problems have on the business, you can quickly drill down to information of interest, such as a group of users having very slow response times, with IBM WebSphere Business Monitor. The Business Monitor also loads its real-time metrics back into the Business Modeler for analysis, completing a life cycle loop of continual improvement and reuse of existing assets.
At a more granular applications and systems level, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager and IBM Tivoli Monitoring solutions take advantage of OMEGAMON technology to bring you a highly integrated environment for managing heterogeneous systems. These solutions help you stay on top of composite applications and diagnose and resolve performance and availability problems that may arise in specific IT systems along their paths.
Other tools that can help you manage SOA applications include IBM CICS operations tools, as well as IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, which coordinates and manages security information needed when composite applications span more than one company or security domain.
Take a justifiable step
IBM helps break down the barriers to your stepping ahead to bring the future and promise of SOA to your company. We can help identify the right SOA projects for your organization to pursue with very attractive ROI. And we can provide the tools, skills and best practices that we've honed through more than 1,000 SOA customer engagements worldwide to help make your SOA implementation a success.
In upcoming issues of CCR2, we’ll explore each phase of the SOA life cycle.
For more information
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