SOA Assessment

A key feature of any SOA assessment for SOA planning should be deciding whether you need to buy a SOA and Web services management solution, what kind you need, and when to buy it. Here are some key points to consider.

SOA Assessment: What Is SOA Management

The first step in assessing SOA management is to understand what it entails. SOA management is a software infrastructure to help ensure that the production operation of SOA-based services delivers on quality of service expectations for technical performance and availability. (Good management processes and SOA best practices and correct use of tools are, of course, also necessary for good management.) In other words, SOA and Web service management solutions should provide tools to ensure that SOA operations are running reliably and meeting production goals.

In addition, SOA management solutions may address a broader range of functions than traditional IT management. An SOA often deals with business services, so the flow of services is a direct reflection of business activity. As a result, SOA management should also address quality of service for SOA security, business operations, and policy enforcement—i.e., provide a deeper, richer level of functionality.

SOA Assessment: How Complex Is Your SOA?

There's another key point that you need to be aware of in assessing SOA management functionality: the anatomy of your services may vary widely. Your service-oriented architecture may incorporate a variety of protocols, not just SOAP, XML-based, and HTTP-based protocols, that is, the protocols associated with Web services. Also, service management goes beyond the interface level: a number of different architectures lie beneath the various service interfaces at the implementation level.

As a result, as you conduct a SOA management assessment, you need to consider what kind of visibility and management across what different protocols, service messaging patterns at the service interface level, and service implementations –you will require in your existing, as well as your planned, SOA environment.

An SOA assessment needs to recognize the variety of service anatomies in your SOA.

In other words, the issue here is more than Web services management; it's SOA and Web services management.

SOA Assessment: When Do You Need SOA Management?

Your SOA assessment should also consider when you need to introduce SOA management. There is an excellent case to be made for having SOA management during initial SOA development. It's invaluable for understanding the performance of services in development and for finding out who is using what (and if unauthorized users or services are in play) during SOA deployment and thereafter. Also, although there are monitoring functions in various traditional IT solutions, they are not focused and deep enough for SOA monitoring, which is the core of SOA management.