As I work with corporate America, as well as the government, I'm finding that
services-oriented architectures (SOAs) are like snowflakes - no two are
alike. I'm also finding that everyone has their own definition of SOA, and
I've seen everything from messaging systems to portals called an SOA.
So, who's right? I'm not sure I'm ready to declare somebody's architecture as
non-SOA just yet;, however, there are some patterns that are emerging in
terms of types of SOAs. I like to refer to these patterns as levels, since
they have a tendency to move from the very primitive, or level 0, to the
highly sophisticated, or level 5.
First, let me offer my definition of SOA, so we have a foundation of what is
both correct and pure (tongue firmly in cheek).
In short, an SOA is a strategic framework of technology that allows all
interesting systems, inside and outside of an organiza... (more)
With the advent of Web services and SOA, we've been seeking to create
architectures and systems that are more loosely coupled. Loosely coupled
systems provide many advantages including support for late or dynamically
binding to other components while running, and can mediate the difference in
the component's structure, security model, protocols, and semantics, thus
abstracting volatility.
This is in contrast to compile-time or runtime binding, which requires that
you bind the components at compile time or runtime (synchronous calls),
respectively, and also requires that changes ... (more)
So, does testing change with SOA? You bet it does. Unless you're willing to
act now, you may find yourself behind the curve as SOA becomes systemic to
all that is enterprise architecture, and we add more complexity to get to an
agile and reusable state.
If you're willing to take the risk, the return on your SOA investment will
come back three fold...that is, if it is a well-tested SOA. Untested SOA
could cost you millions.
Truth be told, testing SOAs is a complex, disturbed computing problem. You
have to learn how to isolate, check, and integrate, assuring that things work
at t... (more)
As you remember from Part 1 of this article series, there are 17 steps to
Cloudsizing, including:
Assess the business. Assess the culture. Assess the value. Understand your
data. Understand your services. Understand your processes. Understand the
cloud resources. Identify candidate data. Identify candidate services.
Identify candidate processes. Create a governance strategy. Create a security
strategy. Bind candidate services to data and processes. Relocate services,
processes, and information. Implement security. Implement governance.
Implement operations.
We covered the first ... (more)
Dave talks about his trip to IBM's Impact Conference, including coverage and
commentary around IBM's cloud computing strategy.
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