SOA Life-Cycle Management

Multiple approaches can be taken to institutionalize SOA life-cycle management. For example, a top-down approach could follow a set of steps similar to those shown below.

1. Determine the business value provided via shared, reusable services
2. Institute the tools, standards, policies, and processes for developing, maintaining, and exploiting shared, reusable services
3. Create a services registry for containing an initial set of deployable services
4. Institute a services monitoring capability
5. Create a services repository and governance mechanism to institutionalize the SOA Approach
• Adopt or create a service development life cycle model
• Create a set of rules for analyzing and reporting on service compliance
• Institute a metadata driven approach to data exchange and service composition
6. Institute a machine-to-machine messaging capability
7. Institute a distributed services hosting capability (ESB) (if required)
8. Institute business process deployment based on web service composition/orchestration

A bottoms-up approach could follow a set of steps that focuses on how to provide a standardized information transport mechanism (e.g., machine-to-machine messaging) between existing applications and products. This is very similar to an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) approach, and it could typically start by instituting an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementation that hosts the appropriate protocol/application adaptors needed to place information on the information transport mechanism. However, this approach can quickly fall into a product-focused solution that fails to deliver any real business value through the use of shared, reusable services and metadata schemas/tagging. Therefore, an organization will rather quickly find itself performing the early steps described in the top-down approach.

Seros realizes that a wide spectrum of SOA implementation maturity exists across today’s organizations. Therefore, Seros has postured itself to support multiple approaches to instituting SOA life cycle management whether it be top-down, bottoms-up, middle-out, etc. Seros has accomplished this via the inherent flexibility offered by our design pattern based approach. That is, we can help to preserve existing product investments through an incremental SOA architecture migration strategy. Regardless of the approach taken to instituting SOA life cycle management, Seros provides low risk and affordable options to move to the required SOA implementation as quickly as possible while also minimizing the complexity of the migration.