SOA Challenges and Solutions

SOA Challenges and Solutions

The benefits of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have been well documented, but the challenges associated with an enterprise wide SOA deployment have not. While the distributed nature of a SOA encourages reuse and provides a high level of agility for the business, it can also give rise to real challenges in the delivery of SOA-based applications.

XML is the core technology enabler of SOA-based applications. Its verbose nature, inherent lack of security, and the increase in connections between applications and services required result in a number of challenges that are well-understood, and that have proven solutions.

The challenge in delivering SOA-based applications lies in identifying where potential problems will arise and addressing them as early in the deployment cycle as possible. Application delivery controllers are well suited to addressing both the well-understood and unanticipated issues associated with delivering SOA-based applications. Incorporating an application delivery controller (ADC) into the deployment plans for your SOA can prevent unnecessary delays and even the need to re-architect portions of your SOA infrastructure - saving man hours, expense, and headaches.

SOA is both an architectural design pattern and a deployment methodology. That s a nice way of saying that no one can define what any particular SOA implementation should look like. While there have been attempts by various vendors in a number of vertical SOA markets to create best practices for SOA environments, these have largely failed due to the rather dynamic and organizational-specific nature of SOA implementations. Because the services that comprise an SOA are business-focused and encapsulate business specific entities, there is no single agreed upon definition of what must exist and how components are deployed in order to bear the title SOA.

There are, however, a set of guiding principles underlying SOA that can be considered a framework around which discussions on common SOA attributes and challenges can be based. The distributed nature of services, for example, is a fundamental attribute of all SOA implementations and as such challenges associated with that deployment model can be applied to all SOA environments, regardless of their actual design or implementation.