How SOA Works

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach to building business applications driven by the need for integration across and beyond enterprise boundaries,lower IT costs, and business agility in a fast-changing world. Traditional enterprise applications often constrain business by their built-in business processes, so making changes to them often requires considerable cost and effort. SOA, in contrast, is designed to help you better align with, and serve, the needs of your business.

The Basics of SOA

In an SOA, applications are composed of modular components—called "services"—each of which performs a specific task or function (for example, a credit checking function). Services are created from scratch or by breaking down, or refashioning, older applications and existing information. In other words, SOA allows your business to leverage existing software assets, resulting in lower IT costs.

What's more, those modular software building blocks can be "loosely coupled"—assembled and coordinated—to form a composite application that performs a more complex business process such as processing an order. In fact, a service (or Web Services) can be reused in multiple applications, including by applications external to the company that "owns" the service.

The key to SOA are Web standards, including XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI. And each service has a standards-based interface. These common standards allow the services to discover, communicate, and interoperate with one another, independent of their underlying operating system, platform, or programming language. That means that, for example, services written in C# running on .NET platforms and services written in Java, running on Java EE platforms, can both be used in a common composite application.

As a result, services can be run on various distributed platforms and be accessed across the network. In other words, in an SOA a business process consisting of coordinated or orchestrated services runs on or integrates heterogeneous environments internal and external to an organization. In this way, SOA further leverages IT resources and lowers IT costs.

Just as important, because of this flexibility and reusability of services, they can be easily created and re-combined to meet new business needs, providing better business agility. In short, SOA makes it easier and faster to build and deploy IT systems that service the goals of the business—rather than constraining how the business operates. SOA provides the best of both worlds, it reuses IT assets and enables IT to flexibly change to better support business requirements.

Challenges of SOA Management

The loosely coupled, dynamic SOA world introduces new challenges specific to SOA management. By nature, SOA spans multi-vendor infrastructure, including different application servers, databases, and network devices. For an SOA to serve your business well, each of these must be monitored and managed to ensure reliable performance, security, and adherence to service-level agreements (SLAs).

But in the heterogeneous SOA world, in which a web service may be shared by several different business processes, there is no dedicated group of systems in which a business process executes as there was with traditional enterprise applications and their silos. Consequently, there is no inherent way to monitor what's going on in an SOA—to track and manage application performance so that you can find and resolve problems quickly.

Other issues arise as well. In addition to lacking IT end-to-end visibility, there is no business process visibility, that is, no way to see IT processing in a business context to assess if SOA business processes are delivering the right level of customer service. And, finally, without monolithic application stacks, it is much harder to enforce consistent SOA security and compliance.

Progress Actional Delivers SOA Management

Progress® Actional® products are designed to meet these challenges and reduce the risk of SOA adoption, throughout the service lifecycle. They are targeted to different business needs, allowing you to build and evolve a practical SOA solution for your business. Using Actional for your SOA management will deliver:

• Application Performance Management
• End-to-end Visibility
• Security and Compliance
• Transaction Monitoring and Alerting
• Service-level Management
• Service Quality and Assurance

SOA Is Not Just About Management

Though good SOA management is important and will help you reap the rewards of SOA - software reuse, agility and the improved alignment of business and IT - it certainly isn't SOA out-of-the box. You still need the communication/transportation layer that an enterprise service bus (ESB) provides, data interoperability products that manage the integrity of data, and the ability to monitor business events as they happen. Progress Software provides  best-in-class products you can use to build, test, deploy and manage an SOA infrastructure. Learn more about:

• Enterprise Messaging
• Enterprise Service Bus
• Data Interoperability
• Complex Event Processing
• Mainframe Integration

Interested in open source SOA? Check out our FUSE family of products.