Question

Write your thoughts on the information you find on the following three topics: How is SOA different? Event driven Agility and Origins of events Governance: Agility and SOA Enterprise Transformation.

Answer 1

To know how SOA is different, we need to understand first what SOA is: A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.

What distinguishes SOA from traditional approaches to enterprise architecture is explained in a published Open Group White Paper on Service-Oriented Architecture. It states that the principle of service orientation can apply throughout an enterprise architecture, but is usually applied to the organisation of the software that supports the enterprise's business operations.

The main differences between SOA and other architectural styles are that:

• The modules are loosely-coupled services which are combined dynamically, as opposed to subroutines, scripts, or other forms of program that invoke each other directly.
• There is more emphasis on infrastructure support for service development and evolution. The enterprise architect has always been concerned with principles and guidelines governing the evolution of the architecture components over time. With SOA, this extends to the specification of particular development tools and methods, and their incorporation in the infrastructure to provide software service lifecycle support.
• Information is not locked up in specific services, as it often is in the so-called "silo" applications of earlier architecture styles, but is available when and where needed throughout the enterprise and its partners, unhindered by artificial boundaries imposed by the enterprise's information technology.

Event driven Agility and Origins of events

To help their enterprises become instantly responsive, CIOs must begin making the transition to event-driven computing. The first step is to consider a complete event-driven SOA foundation that not only addresses today's business problems but can also be scaled up and out to handle tomorrow's challenges.

CIOs must build this foundation using a platform approach to event processing. Although point solutions can seem cost-effective, they may not scale to handle the increased throughput, responsiveness and complexity that will surely be required in the future. Only when a CIO creates the appropriate framework, infrastructure, architecture and data feeds can the IT organization support the enterprise and its revenue growth without pain.

Governance: Agility and SOA Enterprise Transformation

Adopting services oriented architecture (SOA) in one's enterprise without thinking through IT governance can cause extreme rates of growth and minimal law and order which produce unexpected outcomes. The ability to develop and modify services rapidly, the need to ensure that they support the business operations as effectively as possible, and the desire to encourage their re-use by different parts of the enterprise impacts on governance: the process by which the translation of the architect's specifications into implemented systems, and the continuing evolution of those systems, is controlled.

Enterprise architects see SOA governance as a major problem area. It is mainly because they are used to defining governance processes for enterprises that have well-established working procedures, but SOA impacts on those procedures, and changing them is outside the architects' normal scope. Enterprise management must understand this and give their architects guidance and direction, if the architects are to define effective governance processes for SOA, and the enterprise is to derive the benefit from SOA that it should.
Governance

Good governance, in its widest sense, is really about culture, communication, and conformance. People often focus on the third of these, and think of governance in terms of checklists, sign-off procedures, and so on. But it is the first two, culture and communication, that are really the most important, and should come first when planning a governance regime.