SOA Evolution

Today, companies are at various points in their SOA evolution. As a result, there is no longer a "one size fits all" SOA management solution. Rather, different companies (and various stakeholders in them) are trying to achieve different business goals with their service-oriented architecture.

SOA Evolution: A Variety of Challenges

For companies in the early stages of adopting an SOA, the challenge is keeping the SOA up and running efficiently: to monitor SOA performance and availability and find and troubleshoot SOA issues quickly.

For application owners who have successfully tackled that challenge, the issue is to understand how the SOA is delivering business value and to use this information to operate their SOA in alignment with the business. For example, they want to be able to optimize their SOA to ensure that priority SOA consumers (for example, premium customers) get the right level of service.

Finally, in all stages of SOA evolution, making sure all relevant policies—especially in the areas of SOA security and compliance—are enforced is a concern, especially in certain industries. While security and compliance generate no revenue, failure in these areas can have serious consequences, for example financial penalties for SOA compliance gaps. As a result, enterprise security and compliance professionals need tools that can ensure consistent enforcement of SOA security and compliance policies to reduce risks—while keeping the costs of policy enforcement as low as possible.

SOA Evolution: Targeted Solutions for Different Stages and Needs

To address these different audiences and the unique needs that they have in their SOA roles, Progress Software has brought out three Actional SOA management products.

• Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations enables SOA administrators to keep their SOAs up and running effectively. It provides performance monitoring and alerting, automatically discovering and mapping SOA transactions end-to-end and showing all service dependencies. It also generates alerts on performance and availability issues for early detection of problems and, when problems occur, automatically creates a snapshot of problematic SOA transactions. This shows all service dependencies, allowing SOA operations staff to easily trace the problem back to its root cause.
• Progress Actional for Continuous Service Optimization provides application owners with business insight into SOA operations for decision support as well as runtime control of business outcomes. It supplies a range of business metrics—for example, service delivery by individual consumer, consumer group, region, business unit, or custom-defined dimension. It also provides tools to automatically optimize service delivery—for example, content-based routing—to give premium service to a key consumer.
• Progress Actional for Active Policy Enforcement puts security and compliance policy in the hands of experts and enables them to centrally create and manage their policies and apply them at appropriate service endpoints on a distributed SOA network. The result is consistent enforcement, reducing risk. The separation of policies from services enables them to version and change independently—for example, so you don't have to re-code all services for a change in security or compliance--reducing IT work and costs.

Optimized Architecture for SOA Evolution

These Actional products provide their SOA management capabilities based on an architecture optimized for control and high-performance throughout the SOA evolution.

With Actional the various stakeholders centrally create and manage policies and deploy them via appropriate points or agents (white, green, and red circles) for local enforcement of relevant services. This local activity removes the management server as a bottleneck or single point of failure, for high-performance. In addition, the points have virtually no management overhead, taking up less than 1% of the CPU power of the service endpoints on which they are deployed.

In particular:

• Points of visibility (represented by the white circles) discover, monitor, and manage what's going on in the end-to-end SOA environment—enabling effective SOA operations.
• Points of control (represented by the green circles) provide business understanding of SOA transactions and controls, for example, for rerouting SOA transactions—for continuous service optimization.
• Points of enforcement (represented by the red circles) put into action security and compliance policies throughout the network, where appropriate.

Once these points are deployed, as traffic flows through the SOA environment, alerts get generated that inform the relevant stakeholders about issues of concern to them.

For More Information on Solutions for Different Stages of SOA Evolution

Find out more about how the Actional architecture and Actional products serve different business needs. Register to watch the on demand webinar: Operating Your SOA—Are You Up to the Challenge?