SOA and SOA Governance Training Course

Key concepts and themes

• What is SOA?
• Which architectural style should be chosen?
• The "pipe and filter" style
• Constraints on data types
• The development lifecycle
• Providing an appropriate level of abstraction
• Key themes addressed within RUP for SOA

Service identification and specification

• Constructing a model of a service
• WSDL-defined services
• Developing service specifications
• Defining service providers
• Determining the granularity of a service
• A behavioural specification
• Policy specification
• Defining candidate services
• Refactoring services

Managing a service portfolio

• Applications as dynamic entities
• A portfolio of available capabilities
• Process time-binding
• Run-time binding
• WSDL, XSD and WS-Policy
• The service portfolio management process
• Configuring an SLA for a web service

Partitioning service-oriented solutions

• Managing the models
• Categorizing the elements
• Different stakeholders reviewing the model
• Using packages
• Representing views into the model
• Composite structure from UML 2.0
• Using "parts" and "connectors"
• Partitioning the managed services

New and updated guidelines

• Managing message attachments
• Designing messages
• Assuring consistency of message schema
• Service data encapsulation
• Relationship data schema - service boundaries
• Service mediation
• State management
• The merits of stateful and stateless services
• Managing resource state
• Going from services to service components
• The traditional design/implementation model

Message-centric design

• Focus on the service domain
• Domain engineering
• Applying object-oriented analysis and design
• Producing highly reusable models
• The traditional business-to-business arena
• EDI standardisation
• Hybrid message and service-centric approach
• Use case analysis
• Documenting requirements
• Using business process models
• Non-functional requirements
• The requirements database

Service-centric design

• Exposing functions expected of the business
• Exposing operations of service providers
• Creating intuitive service interfaces
• Service-centric modelling
• Use-case driven approach
• Understanding the needs of the actors
• The project goals - from a business standpoint
• Involvement of the software architect
• Policy information required by service consumers
• The business executive role
• Interaction with the back-end system
• Connecting service to implementation model
• Refining the service model
• Addressing performance concerns

Collaboration-centric design

• Collaborating services
• Process view of the services
• Traditional business modelling
• Fulfilling roles in the collaboration
• Partner Interchange processes (PIPs)
• OAGIS standards
• Process-centric mindset
• The "business vs. IT gap"
• "Black box" activities
• Defining key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Versioning and publishing a model
• Producing metrics for monitoring
• Choreography language
• Business process execution language (BPEL)
• Monitoring the services

What is SOA Governance?

• Compliance to standards or laws
• Change management
• Ensuring quality of services
• Managing the portfolio of services
• Managing the service lifecycle
• Using policies to restrict behaviour
• Monitoring performance of services

The SOA Governance issue

• Governance emerging alongside SOA initiatives
• A dynamic environment for services to interact
• Encouraging the reuse of services
• Controlling how services interact with each other

SOA Governance Stages

• First: Realisation that governance is needed
• Second: Governance improving business execution
• Third: Mixing technology and changes in behaviour
• Fourth: Technology selection and implementation

Service Management

• Design-time perspective
• Run-time perspective
• Repository of services for reuse
• Services contained in heterogeneous platforms
• Service virtualisation for run-time management of services

Critical governance components

• Service registry service and an asset repository
• Creating a "SOA Centre of Excellence"
• Focusing on establishing SOA organisational guidelines
• The organisational maturity
• Agreed governance policies

SOA Governance tools

• Real-time monitoring of events
• Failures in a BSM framework
• Service-level instrumentation
• Hooking into operational management systems
• Virtualisation as an enabler to separate governance/service logic
• Service virtualisation managed by operational staff

Developing core SOA governance

• Why the SOA technology stack has grown complex
• Mixing between COTS and in-house solutions
• Justifying external consultants to assist
• Figuring out which business we are really in

Roles and responsibilities involved in SOA Governance

• Establishing a SOA Centre of Excellence
• Enterprise-wide planning and assistance in execution
• The roles of the SOA architect/governance architect
• Solving potential conflicting interests
• Ensure that governance guidelines are followed

Barriers to SOA governance

• Not realising the need for governance
• Lack of governance technologies
• Lack of service virtualisations

State of good governance

• Interaction with external parties
• Managing the business rules and BRE management
• Regulations for good governance
• The agreements repository
• Proactively embedding governance in the business
• Governance by action rather than by statement
• SLA monitoring to establish premium prices

Critical success factors

• Start thinking about governance early
• View governance as a moving target
• Manage policies as entities with their own lifecycles
• Choose a technology platform
• The platform should address immediate governance needs
• Future support as SOA infrastructure scales
• Enforce service level agreements