SOA Lifecycle

What is an SOA Lifecycle?

The SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) Lifecycle is a model that is intended to illustrate relationships and dependencies between various independent lifecycles that comprise a mature, enterprise SOA program. To be clear, this model encompasses many SOA conceptualization, planning, development, deployment and support paradigms and is not strictly confined to a Service Lifecycle. In other words, the full SOA Lifecycle supports all aspects of an enterprise SOA program - not just the development of services.

SOA Lifecycle paradigms

Understanding the SOA Lifecycle model requires three key paradigms to be understood. The following paradigms for the SOA lifecycle model will be outlined:

*Productization of Assets
*Relative Independence
*SOA Governance is the Glue

Productization of Assets

The first paradigm that must be embraced is that SOA requires the productization of enterprise assets. In other words, this paradigm requires an organization to understand that it's services, integrations, platforms, and clients are all products - and require full life-cycle support (see product life cycle management). Provider Services become enterprise assets with real, measurable business value that must be managed through a defined life cycle. Integrations become enterprise assets with real, measurable business value that must be managed through a defined life cycle. Service Consumers become enterprise assets with real, measurable business value that must be managed through a defined life cycle. Understanding that there are finite phases in the management of service providers, integrations, and service consumers leads to the next key paradigm: that these phases are independent and interrelated.

Relative Independence

The second paradigm that must be embraced is that SOA programs will have simultaneous and dependent activities occurring throughout the organization in support of its provider services, integrations, and service consumers. These activities, when broken down, will result in grouped activities that can be viewed as disparate, but related, lower level lifecycles. These smaller (micro) life cycles can be viewed independently and managed independently - as long as there is an understanding that the micro SOA life cycles are interrelated in the macro view. In other words, the SOA lifecycles are each only relatively independent - bound by a common glue. The common glue that binds these lifecycles together leads to the next key paradigm: that SOA governance is required to bind the SOA lifecycles together.

"'SOA Governance is the Glue "'

The third paradigm that must be embraced is that SOA lifecycles must be coordinated and orchestrated to avoid inefficiency and failure in an SOA Program. SOA Governance provides both strategic and tactical decision management and a framework for the organization to move forward as a single, cohesive unit through the various SOA lifecycles.

Lifecycle Detail

The following individual SOA Lifecycles provide a model for the independent activities that most enterprises will experience as they develop a mature SOA Program:

*SOA Portfolio Management
*SOA Solution Planning
*Service Management
*Consumer Management
*Integration Management
*SOA Platform, Service, and Integration Production Support
*SOA Program Promotion and Marketing
*SOA Reporting and Analytics
*SOA Governance

SOA Portfolio Management

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems that manage the organization and alignment of services to the business products and activities that the service supports. In this lifecycle area, services are aligned to specific:
*Domains (Ordering, Repair, Billing, Pricing, etc.)
*Products (WidgetOne, WidgetTwo, etc.)
*Applications (System1, System2, etc.)The end result of proficiency in this lifecycle area is an enterprise roadmap and complete service taxonomy - where all services within the enterprise are aligned to specific business products, functions, and lifecycles and service value is, thus, articulated and measurable.

SOA Solution Planning

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems that support planning and coordinating the build of new services, the reuse of existing services, and integrations (consumption) of all services. This involves negotiating capabilities of internal consumers and providers as well as external consumers and providers of services. In this lifecycle, metadata around the integration and services are defined, negotiated, and exchanged. In this lifecycle, the purpose of an integration is defined and success criteria created. Ultimately, this lifecycle area results in a defined consumer and provider relationship.

Service Management

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems associated with creating new services. This may involve creating business or technical (infrastructure) type services (and all relative subsets of service types that are generally based on purpose of services). This lifecycle typically involves Service Analysis, Service Design, Service Build, Service Testing, and Service Deployment (into production systems).

Consumer Management

This lifecycle area focuses on people, processes, and systems that support the creation of consumers of services. Typically, this area focuses on managing portal frameworks / engines, portlet creation, JSP, AJAX, or other User Interface technology solution where a (web) application is created to make a call to a service through integrations with services. As an SOA infrastructure and culture matures, this area will also focus on managing the consumption of lower level services by composite or aggregate type business services.

Integration Management

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems that support creating service delivery contracts or integrations between a service consumer and a service provider. To be clear, there are specific policies, methodologies, architectures, and best practices that are required in order to leverage the tools and systems that provide integration capabilities for both internal and external integrations. This lifecycle area differentiates specifically between Application-to-Application (A2A), Business-to-Business (B2B), and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) type enterprise integrations.

SOA Platform, Service, and Integration Production Support

This lifecycle area focuses on people, processes, and systems that support services and integrations that are in the process of or have been deployed into a production environment. Typically, this area focuses on regular and “as needed” tasks that support monitoring a service’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the service providers and service consumers. In addition, this lifecycle area supports the monitoring of policies within various enforcement points.

SOA Program Promotion and Marketing

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems that educate others about service and integration activities and / or promote services that have been created and integrations that have been completed. In addition, this lifecycle area may provide awareness on services that are being conceptualized and developed as well as integrations that are being conceptualized or negotiated. The purpose of this lifecycle area is to create awareness around SOA programs, projects, initiatives, and capabilities. The end result of proficiency in this lifecycle area is an enterprise communication plan that is specific to educational and awareness activities around the organizations services and integration activities.

SOA Reporting and Analytics

This lifecycle are focuses on the people, processes, and systems that generate measures around the value and performance of enterprise service(s) and integrations. Typically, this lifecycle area is comprised of tasks that produce either automated service measures (operational / web dashboards or integration with Business Intelligence (BI) systems) or manual service reporting reports and analytics. Typically, these measures produce “value” information around specific provider services (Return on Asset), specific consumers (Revenue Generated), families of services (Composite Return on Assets), platform investments (Return on Investment) and specific integrations (Operational Efficiencies).

SOA Governance

This lifecycle area focuses on the people, processes, and systems that provide governance around SOA programs, projects, initiatives, and capabilities. This involves governance of organizations, processes, and systems / tools. Typically, Policy is central to governance. Intrinsic in a policy lifecycle is the ability to create policy, store policy, manage policy, and enforce policy (manually or automatically) within a Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure. Put simply, within the context of the SOA Operational Lifeycle Model, Governance is defined as "the process of driving and coordinating policy between all the different SOA lifecycles." This should not be confused with Service Governance

External links

* [http://kaiseradvisor.blogspot.com/2007/12/5-competing-views-on-soa-lifecycle.html 5 Competing Views on SOA Lifecycle Stages]

ee also

*Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF)