If you like what you see, you are encouraged to become a signatory. Also, twitter search string is #soamanifesto
The text is included below, for your convenience, along with some of my commenary inline. Also, a video to the unveiling ceremony can be found here.
Preamble: Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation. We have been applying service orientation to help organizations consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs.Through our work we have come to prioritize:
NOTE: The following represents a set of core values we came up with to help guide you through the decision making process during your SOA journey. Both sides of the value statement are things that we think are important. This is not intended to be a set of mutually exclusive things, but simply a value system should a tradeoff over priorities need to be made.
Core Values:Business value over technical strategy
Strategic goals over project-specific benefitsSubtly integrated into this simple statement is the idea that you need to scope your SOA projects to provide you with a series of success points that can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time, yet accompany your projects with a longer term strategy of where you want to get to. But don't let project-specific quick wins get you into short-cuts that keep you from you longer term strategic goals.
Intrinsic interoperability over custom integrationThis means services should be designed to integrate and interoperate as a core competency rather than an afterthought. Even if you are service enabling a legacy system this can be accomplished if it is given a priority upfront as part of the design. NOTE: Using an ESB or SOA infrastructure to achieve this is certainly allowable, whether its part of your design strategy up front or an afterthought.
Shared services over specific-purpose implementationsMost of the time services should be built with sharing and reuse in mind. This may not always be the case, but an organization should strive to create services that are shared and reused across departments and across projects.
Flexibility over optimizationThe primary benefit of using service oriented principals is to build flexibility and adaptability to change. This sometimes comes at a cost, so be aware of what the cost of flexibility is. BTW this does not imply that a flexible solution based on SOA can't scale or perform well.
Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfectionThe key word here is initial perfection. SOA is a journey. Service components and their means of interaction are very likely to change over time as the needs of the business change and as you identify holes in your initial implementations. Pursuit of initial perfection is great if you can get it the first time, but don't let it stand in the way of your strategic goals or your project goals.
That is, while we value the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
I will be providing more insight into the following Guiding Principles over subsequent blog posts -
Guiding PrinciplesWe follow these principles:
Respect the social and power structure of the organization.
Recognize that SOA ultimately demands change on many levels.
The scope of SOA adoption can vary. Keep efforts manageable and within meaningful boundaries.
Products and standards alone will neither give you SOA nor apply the service orientation paradigm for you.
SOA can be realized through a variety of technologies and standards.
Establish a uniform set of enterprise standards and policies based on industry,
de facto, and community standards.
Pursue uniformity on the outside while allowing diversity on the inside.
Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders.
Maximize service usage by considering the current and future scope of utilization.
Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals.
Evolve services and their organization in response to real use.
Separate the different aspects of a system that change at different rates.
Reduce implicit dependencies and publish all external dependencies to increase
robustness and reduce the impact of change.
At every level of abstraction, organize each service around a cohesive and manageable
unit of functionality
Here is the full list of Authors:
Ali Arsanjani Grady Booch Toufic Boubez Paul C. Brown David Chappell John deVadoss Thomas Erl Nicolai Josuttis Dirk Krafzig Mark Little Brian Loesgen Anne Thomas Manes Joe McKendrick Steve Ross-Talbot Stefan Tilkov Clemens Utschig-Utschig Herbjörn Wilhelmsen© 2009, the above authors
this declaration may be freely copied in any form,
but only in its entirety through this notice.
BTW that copyright notice is really intended for anyone to freely requote, or redistribute the content as long as it is in its entirety.
Here is a partial list of blog links from other authors on the team (in no particular order) -
Anne Thomas Manes
Stefan Tilkov
Dave Chappell (moi)
Steve Ross-Talbot
Brian Loesgen
Paul Brown
Mark Little
John deVadoss
Clemens Utschig-Utschig
Joe McKendrick
Ali Arsanjani
Cheers,
Dave
Its always a great time, very informative, and a great way for customers, partners, and Oracle staff to mingle and talk about technology. I would like to invite you all to come to my sessions on Tuesday.
This one will have Carl Dumont, CTO of Wellpoint, co-presenting with me talking about their use of Coherence in their SOA environment to cache results from expensive backend system calls -
ID#: S307456
Title: SOA and Application Grid for Improving Back-end Response Times and Reducing Customer Abrasion
Track: Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management
Date: 13-OCT-09
Time: 11:30 - 12:30
Venue: Marriott Hotel
Room: Salon 12/13
Abstract: Service Orientation allows IT to modularize business applications into reusable service components that can be combined together in new ways that are more flexible and capable of readily adapting to business growth and change. However through service enabling of legacy application assets into reusable business services, you may be unwittingly driving increased traffic toward backend systems that weren't ever designed or appropriately sized to handle such loads. In this session, co-presented by Wellpoint CTO Carl Dumont, we will learn how Wellpoint is using a service result cache to build a Data Grid into their SOA fabric that offloads and dramatically reduces load on backend systems, resulting in a cost savings in millions per year.
ID#: S308618
Title: The Service-Result-Cache Pattern: Using a Data Grid in the SOA Tier
Track: Oracle Develop: Service-Oriented Architecture
Date: 13-OCT-09
Time: 14:30 - 15:30
Venue: Hilton Hotel
Room: Yosemite A
Abstract: By service enabling of legacy application assets into reusable business services, you may be unwittingly driving increased traffic toward backend systems that weren't ever designed or appropriately sized to handle such loads. The challenge of building excess capacity into backend systems to handle peak loads at certain times of the day, month, or year can be costly and time consuming.
An Application Grid makes it possible for a business to meet SLA's by enabling applications to achieve predictable latency under increased sustained loads. When combined with a SOA using the Service Result Cache pattern, an Application Grid can dramatically reduce load on backend systems by caching results from frequently accessed services.
I encourage you to also check these summaries of all the SOA Sessions, SOA Governance sessions, and Application Grid sessions.
I hope to see you there!
Dave
Enjoy,
Dave
I have been working with Carl Dumont, the CTO of Wellpoint, for some time now on integrating Application Grid into Wellpoint’s SOA projects. Next week, at Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference in San Diego, I will co-present with Carl on two exciting projects that both involve using Oracle Application Grid in a SOA environment to cache results from service calls to dramatically reduce load on backend systems.
We will present a Cost Benefit Analysis and PoC findings that show 1) Improving response times, reducing down time, and reducing customer abrasion for customer facing applications, and 2) Saving $MMillions in MIPS charge by offloading mainframe usage by integrating caching of results from mainframe service calls in the SOA layer.
Here is the title and abstract for the talk -
Cost-Benefit Analysis: Using SOA and Application Grid to both enhance performance and availability of customer facing applications and reduce mainframe usage charges
The cost of hosting applications on mainframes can run in millions per year. How much of that is allocated on excess capacity and for peak loads and otherwise goes unused? Even for non-mainframe applications, how do you measure the cost of system downtime to your business? What is your customer abrasion factor for self-service apps that are slow to respond and sometimes fail? How can SOA help? SOA, when combined with new advancements in distributed caching and application grid technology can dramatically improve response times for sluggish applications, and also dramatically reduce the cost of mainframe MIPS. How do you explain this to the business?This session, presented by a CTO who wrestles with these issues every day, will discuss a Cost/Benefit Analysis and Proof of Concept that takes us through 2 use cases: 1) Measuring the "customer abrasion factor" resulting from unresponsive self-service applications, and using SOA and Application Grid technology to dramatically improve customer satisfaction. 2) Quantifying the cost of excess capacity for mainframe hosted applications, and Using SOA and Application Grid to dramatically reduce mainframe MIPS usage.
We hope to see you there. If you can’t make it drop me a line and I can arrange to come and talk to you and your co-workers about it.
Dave
Hi Folks,
This Thursday night, 23-Jul-2009 5:30 PM EDT - 9:00 PM EDT, I'll be participating in a panel discussion on the subject of the viability of selling SOA to the business. Other esteemed panelists include Anne Thomas Manes, Dana Gardner, Brenda Michaelson, Sandy Rogers, and of course the Zapthink Boys Ron and Jason. If you're in the Boston area I hope to see you there. Here's the registration link . Hint, use the secret code "ZAPDISC" to get a 50% discount on the event.
Details below:
ZapForum Boston: "SOA: The Night of the Living Dead" Evening Networking Event
23-Jul-2009 5:30 PM EDT - 9:00 PM EDT
M.J. O'Connor's Irish Pub
27 Columbus Avenue
Boston, MA
Dave
Fusion Middleware 11gR1 is the result of a herculean effort that is 3+ years in the making.
The major areas of investment have been –
- The completion of the integration between Oracle and BEA products into unified suites. This matches to the month the schedule that we had committed to publicly when announcing the BEA Strategy last June. This continues our excellent track record of buying best-of-breed software and integrating it together into a common environment.
- Improving the efficiency of modern data centers by extending the capabilities of Application Grids. We now take advantage of new hardware and software advancements such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, 10GB Ethernet systems, and virtualization to allow large sets of compute capacity and memory to be pooled together into virtualized grids or “clouds” that are lower cost, easier to manage with more flexible capacity to respond to business needs.
- Providing new Identity Management and Security technology to consolidate how users, their identities, and entitlements are managed, audited, and controlled to lower costs and improve security on Application Grids.
- A unified and declarative toolset with which Business Users and developers can work together to develop Business Applications & capture the behavior of the applications in metadata.
- A unified Business Process Platform with which to orchestrate humans, applications, and information into processes that can be monitored and optimized in real time, and providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the Enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools
Even though we are integrated into a set of suites, we are also still committed to being hot-pluggable with other technologies. We continue to support multivendor environments, and have extended our open standards support with better support for WS-*; SCA, New Identity Management standards; WSRP 2.0 Support; BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL4People to name a few. In addition we expand our definition of hot-pluggable to now exploit new IT infrastructure trends that are mainstreaming by integrating FMW with these new technologies. For example we have created a new facility to build and deploy virtual appliances allowing organization to exploit Virtualization more effectively.
For more information, go here
Cheers,
Dave
If you're outside of the US, and you can't make it to Washington, D.C., then join live events that are happening around the world. Similar events are scheduled for London (July 2), Munich (July 2), Paris (July 2), Sydney (July 9), Beijing (July 14), Seoul (July 15), Tokyo (July 17), Sao Paulo (July 21), Mexico City (July 23) More Info here.
Does your company use Oracle Fusion Middleware application grid products such as Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, and/or Oracle JRockit?
Nominate your organization today for a chance to be recognized for your cutting-edge grid-based solution!
An application grid enables new abilities in application infrastructure such as pooling resources, dynamically scaling capacity across clusters, caching data in memory, and automating management. If you are using Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, or Oracle JRockit in innovative, grid-like ways, we want to hear from you!
Its easy to register. The final date for nominations is Friday, August 14, 2009
Best of luck and we look forward to hearing from you.
Dave
Here is an excerpt from the session abstract -
This session highlights specific patterns that take advantage of distributed Java™ platform agent-based caching in an in-memory data and execution grid to enable shared state management with near-in-memory access speeds for state data by services in SOA, WOA, and RESTful architectures. Using these patterns, SOA-based applications can achieve predictable scalability and high availability while insulating organizations from the need to enforce special architectural practices across the organization for "stateless" service development, enabling Java technology-based or .NET services to be written like everyday! objects that encapsulate state data with the business logic that operates on it.
The presentation discusses pros and cons of stateless versus stateful services and the service state repository. It explores architectural patterns for service state management such as fault-tolerent collection,load-balanced fault-tolerant services, business logic affinity, level 2 caching, state-based notification, and claim check. In addition, it examines pros and cons of multilevel service state caching in virtualized environments.
Come learn how next-generation SOA-based application architectures can be built to take advantage of scalable, predictable, virtualized environments that are capable of adapting to the ever-changing needs of the business.
Hope to see you there! Its in Esplanade 304-306, Moscone
Dave
The article includes a downloadable example that shows how to use JAXB and a streaming STAX parser to break up large XML documents and store them in an application grid as java objects, use a distributed query to manipulate the objects in the grid, then rematerialize the data as XML upon completion of multiple grid based operations. The pattern is based on common customer scenarios we are seeing.
The article also talks about how a SOA based application would interface with an application grid by implementing a Claim Check pattern.
I wouild love to hear your comments about this subject.
Cheers,
Dave
The interview is located here as a podcast. If you can get past the first couple of of minutes of us patting each other on the back :) we talk about the patterns in the book that we contributed and what it was like doing it.
Cheers,
Dave
According to a writeup on a recent survey from SearchSOA/Techtarget, SOA is growing strong at the enterprise level, as evidenced by this excerpt -
Despite some bad press of SOA at the start of the year, SOA is in fact motoring forward. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).
The TechTarget SOA Survey 2009 was conducted in February of this year. Respondents comprised a mix of developers, architects, C-level execs, managers, consultants and others, the article stated.
]]> Integration is still top of the list for drivers for SOA projects -The top benefits organizations hope to achieve are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%), followed by cost cutting (21%). Staying competitive (8.4%) and driving innovation (8%) tracked low on the expected benefits list.
My experience working with customers in the past several months certainly corroborates this. As always, governance ranks high as a challenge as well as organizational buy-in, and according to Gartner's Massimo Pezzini who was quoted in the article, those not adopting SOA say it is due to lack of skills.
It was refreshing to hear that software architects and their development teams are looking toward infrastructure software such as grid and cloud computing, and that software-as-a-service (SaaS), mobile and composite applications are clearly on application development managers' radar. The aritcle also goes on to say that SOA can assist in controlling expenses and technology overhead, while BPM as a complement to SOA "is an immediate opportunity for customers to get benefits".
There's not much earth-shattering here to me, as I hear and see this stuff all the time from customers. But it is good to see some sobering industry validation amidst all the anti-hype.
Dave
In 2009 a lot has changed - the economy is in doldrums, SOA's viability has been challenged, and IT budgets are fast shrinking. If you are wondering how you are doing against your peers then here's a short, free online assessment and get a personalized report on your vision, your current state, and peer comparison for year 2009.
The report is dynamic in that it rates your answers for each category polled shows how that compares to your peers. In addition, it provides actions and recommendations that vary based on what your maturity level is at that particular category. It also creates a composite score for all subjects queried, with a corresponding the peer score that is the average score of all your peers.
Cool stuff. Check it out.
Dave
]]>According to the press release -
SOA Design Patterns is an innovative catalog of 85 design patterns for service-oriented architecture and service-orientation that documents the most proven and successful design techniques for succeeding with modern-day SOA. In conjunction with the release of the book, the new SOAPatterns.org (www.soapatterns.org) community site has been launched, providing an open forum for the on-going development and expansion of the pattern catalog.Thomas Erl, the world’s top-selling SOA author and series editor of The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl, spearheaded the community effort behind the creation of SOA Design Patterns. In development for over three years, the catalog has been subjected to comprehensive reviews by hundreds of industry professionals, employed by many of the world’s leading technology companies. For a complete list of reviewer and contributor acknowledgments, please visit: http://www.soapatterns.org/acknowledgements.asp
The patterns that I contributed are
Service Grid,
which relies on -
In Memory Fault Tolerant Collection,
and may include -
In Memory Fault Tolerant Stateful Services
and Load Balanced Stateful Services .
Other contributors from Oracle include Anish Karmarkar and Clemens Utschig-Utschig.
Clemens contributions include Canonical Schema Bus, Compensating Service Transaction, and UI Mediator.
Anish's contributions include Service Callback, Service Instance Routing, and State Messaging
Regular podcast interviews for each of the patterns will also be conducted by Joe McKendrick over the next year and made available at InformIT.
preliminary additional press coverage includes Jack Vaughan on SearchSOA/TechTarget, and Joe Mckendrick on ZDNet.
Dave
I came across this set of case studies from the OMG SOA Consortium web site - which highlights SOA success stories across Insurance, Transportation, Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare.
Here are a few more from Oracle customers I culled from various sources –
Apollo Group, one of the leading providers of higher education for working adults, used SOA to automate determining the eligibility of their 120,000 student population for additional funds. The eligibility verification process was driven by many complex rules and required integration with heterogeneous systems such as PeopleSoft Campus Solution, Oracle e-Business Suite Financials and homegrown student record application. The rules that govern a student's eligibility for additional funds were volatile and needed to be quickly and easily modifiable by business users. Once a student is determined to be eligible for additional loan funds by the Oracle Rules Engine, multiple areas of PeopleSoft have to be populated to complete the Additional Funds process. The business logic in the PeopleSoft system had been highly customized so PeopleSoft Component Interfaces were utilized to gain reuse of all Apollo custom business logic. By reusing Component Interfaces, Apollo Group prevented the need to duplicate any business logic in the BPEL processes
The project took 4 months from start to finish with only 3 months to architect and develop the solution. The process was comprised of 12 BPEL sub processes containing over 450 BPEL activities. It interfaced with three different ERP systems to retrieve student information and inserted data into 12 PeopleSoft Components using Component Interfaces. Said Mark Forier, IT Director of Applications at Apollo Group.
Success of this project demonstrated the capabilities of IT and the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to upper management and the business. We achieved a 600% ROI on this project with a four month time frame on a $300,000 investment. Essentially, a significant and immediate return.
Tucson Electric Power Company expects to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent. They expect to implement and integrate new applications 36 percent faster and reduce time spent on supporting and maintaining the system by 50 percent.
Tucson Electric Power Company provides energy services in a regulated market and is focused on controlling costs while expanding IT services to increase business efficiency. The utility's IT infrastructure includes hundreds of specialized application interfaces and lacked a unified process for implementing new applications to deliver new services. To reduce IT complexity and administration requirements - and accelerate new application implementations - Tucson Electric Power Company selected Oracle SOA Suite to create a single enterprise-wide integration environment.
They are integrating their STORMS Work Management application with the Oracle E-Business Suite, which allows them to streamline work requests sent from STORMS to Oracle Projects and to track project costs more efficiently. The STORMS application enables the organization to rapidly assign field crews to restore electricity service and make repairs caused by storm damage.
Oracle SOA Suite (which enables underlying support for their service orientation) helps eliminate customized application integration requirements, establishing a framework of reusable components that allow Tucson Electric Power Company to simplify integration between additional work management applications and other back office systems - eliminating the requirement for custom, "hard wired" interfaces.
Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA), which manages an Amtrak intercity passenger train service in eight Northern California counties is using SOA as the foundation for its Automated Ticket Validation Services initiative.
Committed to continually improving customer service and security, CCJPA plans to launch California's first real-time ticket sales and validation system on its trains. The system, which is scheduled to go live in 2009, will allow CCJPA conductors to use hand held scanners to validate and sell tickets to customers on the train. This will also improve security by being able to track when passengers board and exit the train. The scanners will utilize Web and business process execution language (BPEL) based services to link CCJPA and Amtrak's IT systems.
Last but not least, is one of my favorites, Green ROI - It is widely believed that green revolution is the answer to the current downturn. How can SOA help you go green? Verizon Wireless did it using SOA, reducing their hardware footprint by 95% and measuring their ROI by reduction of tonnage of hardware in the datacenter. I blogged about this earlier in the year.
Dave