Infrastructure Management
Managing Web services and SOA applications
SOA on the management radar
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives promise to cause management challenges for IT managers looking to ensure application performance and exceptional IT service delivery.
Network World recently devoted a New Data Center issue to the topic of SOA in the enterprise and offered articles on putting SOA best practices in place as well as managing the loosely-coupled applications across distributed environments. And I trolled the vendor landscape to find 10 tools to address SOA governance, quality and management.
And Network World isn't the only industry watcher with SOA management on its radar. Separately, Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst Randy Heffner recently put out a series of reports on stand-alone tools to manage SOA and Web services. Forrester looked at products during July and August of this year and interviewed vendor and user companies to determine what tools are available today. Vendors included Amber Point, BEA Systems, CA, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Progress Software, SAP and more. The research firm also defines what it sees as SOA and Web services management, something the analyst group considers critical for any SOA implementation.
Forrester defines it as such: "Software infrastructure to ensure that the production operation of SOA-based services delivers on QoS expectations for technical performance and availability and, optionally, on QoS for security, business operations, and general policy compliance"
Heffner also spells out facts about SOA that will require enterprise IT managers to plan for "robust SOA management."
To start, Heffner clarifies that SOA management involves more than just Web services. "For reasons of performance, reliability, or maturity, many firms find it necessary to deliver SOA-based services using both Web services and other protocols such as Java Message Service, native .Net protocols, and Java RMI," the report reads. "With today's levels of Web services maturity, Web services can't meet all SOA demands."
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