Anand Gopalan's Blog

SOA - Client Side view

2008-05-07T20:42:35Z

Many a time in architectural design discussions with client, I find people tend to focus on the solution part even before defining the existing problem or future need.

As a consultant one should always focus on the business need or the actual problem at hand, rather than to define a new architecture o rearchitecture the existing environment.

Only this way we can bring the business value the customer is looking at. As a practice, I usually pause in between and evoke more responses from client. Typically over one week we should redefine the customer requirement in clear terms and define the scope and only then should we harp on to the architectural blue print.

But sometimes people tend to get away with a very good design and SOA architecture and implement the same. But in the long run the customer realize that say a component like BAM which is not their immediate requirement but an extended security architecture which was one of their primary requirements has not been given due focus.

Such instances send a wrong signal to the customer that they have been a victim of a poor design that is based on harnessing superior product capabilities rather than translate their exact requirements to actual design.

SOA Begins at Home

2008-03-12T22:28:12Z

IT Majors, Software consulting companies are no mood to catch up the race later , but rather dive as soon any technology is announced be it SOA,ESB,CEP. Do they really practise it in their own den?#*!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Many a times we see major IT Software Service provider companies tout on their experience on the implementation of latest technology/design principles in their customer projects. But if those principles are universally accepatble across various problem domains, why not implement them in their own company first before taking it to the customer.Have you ever seen any IT Major in consultancy business talk about how successfully SOA or Ajax or web services initiatives turned their own business more agile,profitable. The reasons are multifold

1) Most of the times the R&D or experiment happens at the expense of the customer. Since these days the design principles like SOA are open standards based and have solid underlying concepts they work more often and the vendors get away with success. While they show success stories of Major process optimization across various domains like HR, Finance etc in ther client assignments, they may be battling with the age old systems with tight coupling in their own organization due to constraints like finance, time, loss of billability if such resources (Consultants,developers) are used for internal architecture revamp rather than on an client project.

2) High competetion. If some company can afford to try things and prove their capability in a new or maturing technology, the other competitors can catch the bus and grab those coveted projects. That makes sense , as the cost and time to market becomes a crucial factors in many projects. Hence such wait and leap will not fly with demands of current IT projects.

This blog is not to totally discount the fact that some mulitinational product / service provider companies are there in business, who practise what they preach. Like for instance I saw a presentation from a SOA Product Vendor explaining how they successfully implemented their Colloboration product suite in their own company with full fledged blogging, messaging , conferencing and wiki unification before taking such solutions it to the customer.

I feel more and more such success stories from the vendor companies themselves not just customer testimonials can instill full confience on their capabilities

SOA Governance - Extended Scope

2008-01-24T05:26:26Z

SOA Governance usually deals with web services, Registry / Repository solution. But there is lot of unexplored areas where governance can a play a role as well. This post will attempt to uncover those i can think of

Governance is all about setting up organizational policies,standards ando ensure that they are adhered to.

Web services governance is very important for successfull SOA, but is also important is include the governance for other implementation components as well.

To start with I can think of Coding standards and guidelines, though we have been practising this a lot from EAI days. But what we ignored is to bring this into automated governance. Always reviews that happen for the code to ensure that they follow the guideleines. This substantial time and manual effort .

The smarter approach should have been

1. Proactive standard compliance: This will have developers being notified immediately .Say when a low level proprietary business service logic is being developed it can alert for errors like incorrect folder names, variable names etc.

This option is targeting the compliance violations at source even before they can occur.

I am not suggesting this from a programming language standpoint ( C++,VC++,Java. Who can forget the syntax errors shown in VC++ editors immediately after you jump to next line). This is more from a SOA Vendor suite perspective.

For example in a product like webMethods, Business service package is the top level component, under which folders and services are developed. Often these services get reused across folders. When the code is up for code review and if there are coding standard mismatch, it involves considerable time to fix them up.

So my suggestion is to have this option built into product development tools that is configurable to include these standards and guidelines. One good candidate is Eclipse, we can develop standard checker plugins that can work with the product vendor suites using Eclipse framework in achieving this.

2 Automated Review: Using this tool, the coding standard violations can be trapped, this can be used by the developer and be run whenever he completed a logical point within code, so that are less possible violation cases when his code comes up for review.

I would like to if there are any SOA product vendors who are working on these lines.

Time, cost and effort savings are the number one factor in the implementation list of any business project. I feel the effort in this direction can a help that cause to some extent.

I agree the above focus was very narrow looking at a micro level on factor like coding standard, i hope we all think more in the next posts to extend the governance scope further .....

SOA levels for business

2008-01-02T23:18:54Z

I find more and more definitions of SOA being floated out every day , also hundreds of new chapters on SOA Business benefits. I feel selling of SOA is already been done , Every business organization which has not implemented SOA so far, has already realized the need for it. But what they lack is the customized plan to take the SOA Route for its business problem

I feel the need of the hour is not

what is SOA,

what are its business benefits( BAM, Orchestration, Legacy modernization........), architectural selling points ( loose coupling, reusability .....), what is SOA security, SOA Governance ( must have in survival kit ( of its own business:) )of every SOA Vendor.

I feel we can approach the same by defining various levels

Again I am aware of the fact there was already some effort had been put in defining SOA Maturity models, various levels of SOA ( Soa Lite , matured etc).

How this approach will differ is when its comes to customization and a holistic approach involving all users within an organization

SOA Level 0: Involves studying the need for SOA for a specific business organization, defining approaches for new SOA based applications and Migration of existing applications to SOA. There will be SOA Councils set up within organization, who will clear identify SOA entry points for their business apllications, educate the respective teams with the new SOA culture, Governance. At the end of this phase , there should be a blue print to approach the SOA Route.

SOA level 1: This is where we start thinking in terms of implementation of SOA Plan. At the technology level it could be using web services, open standards,BPEL, at the Governance level on basic Policies, contracts that needed to be in place. Again emphasis here is not getting all SOA Ingredients into the implementation, but choosing what makes immediate business sense to embark. For example if there are less critical application being SOA Enabled there may not be need for full fledged BAM or business reporting to be in place.

I shall gather my thoughts in the mean time and try to refine the above post also come up with more levels.

Again my objective here is to arrive at a SOA Implementation plan that is measurable and all business users should be able to validate their SOA phase against a common SOA Implementation Matrix.

SOA level 2: This is where the business reasses its SOA Strategy and see if benefits surpass cost associated with. After which they embark on a much larger scale of SOA implementation plan.

The above discussion points may not give a ready to implement methodology. But the intent being to stir up a thought on how to arrive at an SOA standard which focuses on impementation and be able to measure one's SOA capability at various predefined end points.

I had another interesting conversation today with my colleague today on SOA enablement. Is the term "SOA Enablement " is rightly understood. Let me try to explore through the popular example SOA Legacy modernization . In most of the vendor whitepapers that discuss on this topic , they comeup with web services wrapper over existing legacy applications and claim that is SOA. Surely it is a step towards SOA, but not exactly the SOA enablement. This is where the overlap that lies today between SOA and its benefits. The above example would have provided the business with benefits like reuse of existing assets, no rip and replace, Loose coupling, Increased ROI, but that does not necessarily mean ,they have SOA in place.

For this solution was possible even in EAI days , when web services was just added to its capabilities. But difference being EAI was purely an IT approach. There needed a bridge between business and IT , not just from a solution perspective , but right from analysis phase. That is where SOA came into rescue. There is no new component in SOA which was not there in EAI. Yes there was BPM, there was limited BAM capability. There was still alignment happening through business processes. But was absent was open standards. This is where SOA started gaining pace, in terms of open standards like BPEL,WS* standards,

SOA is the collection of best practices in architecture that has evolved over time in aligning the business goals with IT.

Not to sidetrack from my initial point SOA enablement, this is where I feel a standard for SOA enablement, level of SOA would have helped clear this confusion. if we have level 0 and some one who was doing legacy enablement would have had an oppurtunity to realize that what they achieved is not fully SOA , more work remains to reach industry accepted SOA level.

BPEL

2007-09-23T05:06:11Z

BPEL,XPDL,BPMN are some of the frequently used terms when talking of process enablement in SOA

Developing a new business application entirely based on these open standards should be a straight forward one. But what it takes convert a existing business process built on proprietary standards is very challenging.le

Recently I worked on a migration approach to migrate proprietary process models from Savvion to Oracle BPMS (Oracle Process manager,Oracle BPA).

As an architect my role was first evaluate if there exists any component which can be reused in this approach, to my surprise, It shaped up as more of a new development of those process models. Ideally there should exist a definite approach laid down( surely not by the proprietary vendors, but the open standards group) to ease this process of open source adoption.

I would like to know , Is there exists any standard approach for the BPEL migration from native models?.

SOA Boundaries

2007-05-07T06:08:13Z

These days we find more and more vendors claim that value addition to SOA with their newer acquisitions, or newer versions of their software,I am afraid if we are not going back to product driven EAI model

Be it business intelligence, trendy reporting wizards,omnipresent Ajax all can find place in a given SOA suite. Yes they may make life easy with how we approach SOA, but do they fit translate to te SOA objectives set in a given company?.

On one side there are these strongs set of standards being developed to strengthen SOA , on the other side there is a gap developing in terms of adoption. With SOA being more for an enterprise integration , the front end IDEs,portals all facilitate the path to SOA , but when it comes to business IT alignment , the open standards provides the means to achieve them. Hence if we can have a strong mapping product suites to emerging standards , then we can be assured that we don't fall into the trap of IT driven EAI days

ECLIPSE and SOA

2007-05-07T00:36:34Z

Gone are the days when the developers need to put in special efforts to master an IDE and develop components. Now with Eclipse framework, there is considerable amount of effort savings when developing UI components. All major SOA vendors these days base their development front end based on Eclipse either as RCP or available as plug ins in an Eclipse environment.

Sometime back I wrote an Article in Eclipse magazine ( till sometime it was only available with entire magazine download, which required registration). Now that is available as a featured article for easy access . Article titled Eclipse Power for SOA is available at

http://www.eclipsemag.net/ecm/psecom,id,3,archive,1,nodeid,3,.html?PHPSESSID=cb06165ad27a3fe0aca3cb553bf17f90

SOA Architect

2007-03-13T07:29:24Z

SOA Architect is premium resource these days. But organization tend to look for Long term specialists in a product suite mainly keeping implementation in mind. So the role of architect or a hired consultant typically get less emphasized after analysis and design phase of project

In order to stay alive with challenging technological advancements it becomes necessary to think about grooming architect potential resources and have them validate the analysis and design phases of the projects.

But this requires a long term vision and skills assesment. Though there will be temptation to think about the bird in hand which is deploying the key resources on to implementation, thoughts needs a realignment now about transforming some of them on to take the architecture guidance path. This requires lot of time and money in focusing their strengths and give an architectural flavor to it.But this can reap rich dividends , when you have them work across projects in providing consultancy that is when the groomed candidates tranform to Core Architects.

Let me explore this in the subsequent blogs as to how to embed the seeds of architect prospects into their organizational culture

SOA Performance

2007-03-06T00:31:15Z

In this discussion let us explore the factors that impact SOA performance and explore the best practices

Often performance is a relative term. But inspite of having such loose definition, we can still nail down the list of factors that needs consideration while designing an SOA application. let me list down the factors that come to my mind , though a later stage we can group them into specific areas,

1. Application clustering

2. Third party Load balancer

3. Process models

4. Service granularity

5. Web services and the transport mechanism ( RMI, SOA over http)

6. Data Caching ( Memory access Vs Disk based access)

7. Logging

8. listeners ( Say a port listeners Continuously listens to a port), schedulers

The above list is not comprehensive and shall grow over the time

So irrespective of the vendor that we choose for an SOA implementation, it becomes necessary to define our own performance guidelines and choose the tool that best fits our performance requirement.

I invite your views on defining generic SOA performance guidelinss

Meta data management and SOA

2007-02-22T22:04:01Z

SOA Metadata management is a key area in any SOA implementation these. Hence it goes without saying, that effective metadata management strategy should be in place.

Often we get to hear about role of metadata management in SOA suites.

Metadata management generally appears in the context of Registry -Repository where in you manage the service artifacts,policies etc.

In the BPM context, we can manage the BPEL atrifacts as metadata.

The access to the metadata happens via API,Classes,Wizards.

With this introduction i am planning to explore more about

Effective stratagies for metadata mangement, is performance tuning of metadata Needed.
Current maturity level(simple/advanced) of metadata management in the available SOA product suites today.
Meta Data security