SOA as a platform
Service Oriented Architecture is moving toward being integrated and deployed as a platform. In early SOA development everybody used a different software vendor, many using several in an effort to go best of breed. Over time people have realized that you can get a complex SOA to work with best of breed products. You need a talented systems integrator, but it can be done. However as time marches on, because the vendors are not synchronized with their releases, fixes, and so on, the stack falls out of sync. Problems develop that are difficult to fix as they bridge multiple vendor modules.
A trend has developed that understands the core functioning of the SOA is not something by which an integrator can distinguish itself. Furthermore, if they spend a lot of time in the bowels of the SOA they inevitably spend less time focusing on building mission services and functionality. Because of this conundrum integrators have become receptive to software vendors delivering a fully functioning SOA stack. This Core is then used as a springboard to jump start mission development.
The diagram above shows the basic configuration of a SOA Core. Customers have learned that leaving capabilities once through optional, such as ‘Monitoring & Management’ until later causes problems. IBM has developed a basic set of SOA software that comes preintegrated as a SOA Core capable of federating across multiple nodes.
This Core, deployable in a day, provides the basics of an SOA node. This platform-based approach recognizes the need to lift customers up out of the SOA. In the early days people were fascinated by SOA. Now they wish it would just work. This evolution of usage pattern is typical with technology. Customers are at the phase where they’d like to get SOA working quickly and realize the mission value of it versus the technical wow factor. When a software vendor, like IBM, can show up with a blade center, plug it in and the SOA is already up and running – then customers are happy to use SOA for their real mission problems. This platform-based approach, being the natural evolution, will replicate itself at the federation level as well. More on that later.
