Guiding SOA Evolution through Governance from SOA 101 to Virtualization to Cloud Computing 2010

The evolution of how companies employ SOA can be broken down into three phases: the initial phase focuses on migrating from previous approaches like component based applications to services and the best practices around building services. Once a company has completed initial SOA projects, the number of deployed services increases such that the key question no longer is how to build services, but rather how to efficiently govern the development and operation of services on an Enterprise scale. The focus of a second phase SOA shifts to reusability, securing how a growing number of clients access the services, assuring that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met, etc. Service virtualization plays a key role in this phase, which provides a decoupling of clients and services and replaces non-business logic in services with configuration in middleware that acts as intermediaries, like Enterprise Service Buses and SOA Appliances. While enterprise architects focus on SOA, the data center and operations managers have server virtualization on their agenda as a top priority to increase efficiency and reduce cost. These two efforts have not been treated synergistically by most companies, but they should. The provisioning of virtual servers should be done using a SOA based service infrastructure paradigm and the business services should automatically be mapped onto infrastructure resources in order to implement on-demand resource provisioning to better meet SLAs. This approach to the second phase in the SOA evolution positions a company for a natural progression into phase three, where services move into the cloud. Regardless whether we move to an enterprise cloud or one that is hosted by an external provider, everything we have learned and implemented in the first two phases of SOA applies even more so, since issues like security and integration become more complex in the cloud and SOA Governance plays an even bigger role. This seminar walks you through the three phases of evolving SOA and how to use a maturity model to build your SOA Roadmap. It then discusses how SOA Governance relates to business, IT, and Enterprise Architecture (EA) governance; it details what comprises SOA Governance, provides insights into current standards, vendor approaches and technologies, and closes with a case study that illustrates some of the governance principles and how to measure success.