In this article, we will be looking at the implementation process of an Enterprise Services Layer built on Service Oriented Architecture by the Prolifics Integration team and the important lessons learned during the course of the implementation. After all, reusable lessons go hand in hand with the process of developing and implementing reusable services.
This article is divided into three sections:
- Details of the solution and the major decisions taken during project lifecycle
- The lessons learned during the implementation process
- Project Success
The Business Challenge
Due to the lack of an enterprise wide integration layer, business units were unable to easily consume the services offered by other units and share business data. This prevented the organization from providing new and value added services to consumers resulting in lost market opportunities and revenue growth.
The Business Requirements
- Develop a common service hosting layer that various business units can utilize to access enterprise services
- Build a highly available, scalable and flexible solution that provides maximum throughput and 99.999% uptime
- Implement an effective service governance framework
- Implement a platform and services monitoring and reporting solution
Project Kick-Off Approach
The Prolifics team worked with leaders and representatives from customer IT departments and business units to understand the corporate culture in general and team culture in specific. The idea was to understand the way projects typically get done at the customer and customize our approach to developing and deploying the solution by understanding the current processes and practices.
1. Team Education
One of the first tasks undertaken was to educate the stakeholders involved and bring about a common understanding of the project goals and solution. The goal was to make sure that we clearly communicate the scope of the solution; that is what the solution is meant for and what the solution is not meant for.
2. Create SOA principles
This project being the first to build an enterprise-wide services layer based on SOA, we established a set of SOA principles in-order to keep the project implementation aligned with the project requirements and maximize the organization’s return on investment in this project.
- Consistent service definitions and implementation
- Consistent and secure access to corporate processes and data
- Standard-compliant enterprise governance
- Consistent and well-defined data model
- Cross-enterprise platform and services monitoring
3. Establish an SOA Center of Excellence
A successful implementation of a large scale SOA initiative requires bringing people from different business and technical areas together to support the implementation goals. The COE team was tasked with creating a solution blueprint to drive the overall implementation tasks and help the organization to adopt, formalize and improve the development process.
The following were the main responsibilities of the COE team.
The Technology Foundation
To meet the service layer requirements, choosing the right technology foundation to host the solution is an important aspect; this is especially true since multiple components and systems need to integrate and function together seamlessly. It is important to consider not just the current requirements, but rather the long-terms requirements; the future growth, flexibility to add additional services, integrate with new and disparate systems, support additional throughput and at the same time maintaining the performance, scalability and availability.
The solution comprised of the following products:
Key Factors in Choosing the Technology:
Deployment Topology:
The below diagram shows the solution deployment topology.
- The service consumers connect to the global Load Balancer which based on the consumer region and load balancing algorithms, connect to one the of the available downstream load balancers
- The service consumers can use a single endpoint that provides abstraction and high availability
- The DataPower devices act as a secure gateway, provide additional internal load balancing and SOA policy enforcement point
- IIB – A Highly available IBM Integration Bus architecture provides the service execution, message flow orchestration, advanced transformation and data enrichment platform
- Fail-over infrastructure – Multi-node, inter-frame and cross site infrastructure provide advanced fail-over mechanisms
- WSRR – WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides service life-cycle governance features and acts as the service policy definition point
Lessons Learned
Educate the Stakeholders
Ensure that the stakeholders understand SOA principles, project scope and project goals. This step needs to done right at the start of the project; saves significant amount of time and money during the overall project roll-out and helps keep the project on schedule.
Security
Plan for security right at the start of the project; this includes determining the protocols, encryption technologies, authentication and authorization processes etc. If the customer does not have an enterprise wide common security standards, it is possible that individual teams use different and at time incompatible security practices and processes that can lead to substantial challenges during the integration process.
The Center of Excellence needs to provide sample code, documentation and implementation approaches to assist the different teams in pursuing a common security standard.
Make sure service consumers understand the implementation details
Ensure that the service consumers understand the details of connecting to the service layer and consuming the available services. Most often, service consumers face challenges when it comes to connectivity details, security implementation details etc. To make the process easier, have test beds made available for the consumers. Additionally, a functioning and well documented integration environment will further help in this process.
Follow industry and internal standards
As part of the Center of Excellence enterprise architectural decisions, make sure that the stakeholders agree on the industry as well as internal standards that need to be followed. With limited resources and budget, common standards and practices will help in easier and simpler overall implementation process. This will additionally help in ensuring that the various teams can talk a common language and provide common support and maintenance services.
Avoid Service Layer Complexity
The service layer complexity needs to be avoided. Additionally, only the necessary operations that directly enable integration connectivity and facilitate associated supporting activities should be deployed on the Service layer. It is important not to task the service layer with an application or service provider specific activity or functionality. The service layer needs to be lightweight, scalable and highly available.
Iterative Deliverables
When an organization is just getting started with an SOA based service layer approach, identify the services that can be easily and readily hosted on the service layer. By taking a long term and iterative deliverables approach, the return of investment can be maximized and risks can be reduced.
Performance Testing
Most often, it is difficult to understand the performance behavior of various applications and systems in an Enterprise Service solution. With services hosted by multiple business units and often running on different technologies, performance bottlenecks can be a recurring problem.
In order to properly understand the performance behavior of the various systems and the overall solution, it is important to do performance testing early and often. Surprises such as a bad network route or a wrongly configured server can be avoided if performance testing is incorporated as part of the development life-cycle and performance engineering best practices are followed.
Monitoring and Reporting
In a typical SOA based environment, tracking down performance and availability issues can be extremely challenging due to the loosely-coupled design. Additionally, with services hosted by multiple providers, keeping tracking of SLA and performance counters can prove to be even more difficult.
In order to deal with these challenges, it is important to have an end-to-end monitoring solution. The solution should ideally monitor not just the operating infrastructure (performance, availability etc.) but also the business services (SLAs, service availability etc.). It is also important to have a solution that can provide useful and easy-to-understand reports that will assist in planning for capacity planning and performance analysis.
Organizational Readiness
- IT departments and organizational units typically find that the process of introducing new initiatives that change the way projects are typically done is difficult. To ensure project success and maximize IT investment returns, strong leadership support for these initiatives is required. It is essential that the leadership team communicate the significance of the project and establish a strong project management team.
Importance of Service Governance
- In order to provide consistent and standardized development, delivery and implementation of services and reduce risks, a strong governance model needs to be established as part of the project life-cycle. In a large scale implementation involving numerous teams, a strong service governance model that can handle the entire service life-cycle can ensure that the implementation process aligns perfectly with the business requirements and organizational goals.
Project Success
The Enterprise Server Layer currently handles over 6 million transactions per day. With a strong architectural foundation in place, the platform can seamlessly support additional throughput by horizontal or vertical scaling in a highly available environment. Additionally, the solution delivered end-to-end governance, monitoring and performance reporting.
The solution proves that with proper architecture, design principles and team partnerships, organizations can achieve excellent return of investments and realize project success that can enable new market opportunities and business growth.
Authors:
The team of integration experts at Prolifics enable customers to maximize the return on their IT investments by providing end-to-end integration, governance and monitoring capabilities. To learn more about Prolifics' integration solutions, visit: http://www.prolifics.com/soa-universal-connectivity
Authors:
The team of integration experts at Prolifics enable customers to maximize the return on their IT investments by providing end-to-end integration, governance and monitoring capabilities. To learn more about Prolifics' integration solutions, visit: http://www.prolifics.com/soa-universal-connectivity
