SOA Management

Solution Approach
Before crafting and using a federated management solution, a business must establish a solid foundation of development and management practices for their services. To maximize visibility, flexibility, and accountability, it must avoid practices that embed management logic within service functions and instead externalize management to make it more accessible at the operational level. The proposed FSM solution is based on the following core tenets:

• Separate and decouple management logic from business logic and externalize management code from within the service. This cleanly separates development and operational concerns and allows management logic to evolve independently from the business logic.
• Relieve service developers from responsibility for management logic to free up time required for building better business processes. Developers are hence shielded from routine service management tasks that are best externalized as declarative tasks performed by operational administrators.
• Develop a configuration-based approach to service management that can adapt to changing number, complexity, and behavior of services. Use declarative logic to create configurations for services and their associated policies and rules.
• Make service management a pure operations-level task and empower administrators and business analysts to configure, monitor, and control the business services.
• Implement a common service management layer to streamline the development process and accelerate migration to an enterprise-wide SOA.

Key Solution Capabilities
The list below identifies a partial list of capabilities for the proposed solution:

• Discover and store service definitions for services across divisional and enterprise boundaries
• Define and store configurations and policies related to services, performance metrics, and SLAs
• Cache service configuration and policy metadata to minimize processing times
• Automated search, discovery, and update of services, including the ability to batch load services
• Dynamic run-time execution of management policies
• Search, filter, and view details on any service, activity, message, organization, exception, or alert
• Monitor, track, and audit key service activities and performance metrics
• Identify, intercept, and handle exceptions
• Define and generate alerts based on service policies and SLAs
• Define and generate reports on service operations and performance
• Provide a holistic, 360-degree view of services

The Technology
Key Technology Characteristics
When settling on implementation details, solution designers need to consider the key technology characteristics that will enable them to use FSM to achieve their goals. First and foremost, it should be standards based. Building on 100 percent Web service and open source standards ensures maximum compatibility and avoids the potential for lock-in to proprietary software. Along with standards-based development, the solution should strive for platform-independence and support multiple deployment models to maximize flexibility (see Figure 3).

In addition, a FSM solution should be lightweight with a small footprint, and updates, where feasible, should be performed without server restarts or downtime.

Architecture Framework
The proposed technology architecture is based on a "management via mediation" approach in which a management intermediary sits between client applications and endpoint services in order to manage the service interactions. Because the service endpoints could be anywhere, the intermediary usually is located closer to the client applications and business processes. This architecture enables: 1) managing the service metadata via a repository, 2) managing service execution using an intermediary to apply management logic at run time, and 3) remote administration via a console to provide enterprise-wide command and control of services and related activities.

Discovery and Configuration
To provide federated management and governance for SOBAs, the execution layer needs to know more than where the service is and how to invoke it. It needs to identify and store critical information necessary for defining and configuring services - protocols, policies, SLAs, etc. The set of nonfunctional characteristics defined in the service metadata can be referred to as a service configuration. Configurations can be derived from an extended service definition, when available. Storing service-related metadata as configurations in a repository provides the foundation for monitoring and controlling those services. A repository should ideally include the capability to identify and register services in an automated fashion. As part of its discovery function, a federated repository should be able to search public and private registries to identify new services as well as updates or new versions of existing services.

The repository can be implemented as a high performance data store. In addition, the repository should leverage intelligent caching techniques to deal with compute and network latency issues, and improve management logic processing times.

Management Logic Mediation
To control services in a federated manner, a business must have the flexibility to dynamically define and execute management logic at run time. This can be accomplished by using an intermediary to mediate the management logic into the service process. An advantage to using intermediaries to manage services is that it shields service consumers from any changes in how services are deployed and managed at the endpoints. Essentially, the intermediary serves as a management execution layer that unifies management logic for all of the services used.

The intermediary can operate in two modes:

• Management Gateway: A gateway provides a single, well-known access point and serves as a proxy between service consumers and service providers. Connecting to a gateway is as simple as changing the access point from the endpoint service binding address to the gateway's address. This mode works well as the intermediary between SOBAs (and other consumers internal to the enterprise) and external service providers.
• Management Server: A management server acts as a central server to multiple agents distributed across the service network. This mode works well when performance considerations owing to client-intermediary communications latency outweigh the need for zero-installation management software on the various nodes of the service network.

The actual intermediary mode of choice depends on the architectural requirements of the business. In either mode, a management intermediary establishes control and performs its mediation functions by forming a virtual pipeline of compartmented management logic dedicated to various management functions (such as message logging, security, caching, and performance monitoring). The pipeline is designed as a set of request handlers that sequentially handle the request and response message flows. At the center of the pipeline is the service access logic. Each handler dynamically executes management logic from the appropriate configurations and policies stored in the repository.

The management intermediary can be implemented as a Web service and scaled horizontally across multiple servers, offering a high degree of scalability and performance for the overall management layer.

Administration
An administration console is a centralized interface to provide a common point of control for configuring and monitoring all services. The console enables administrators and business managers to define, configure, and monitor business services and other related resources. It provides administrators, developers, and business managers with a means to review services and modify service behavior dynamically and in real time. It also provides powerful dashboard views for monitoring the service network.

A console can be delivered as a simple, Web-based application that can be accessed remotely without any special software installation requirements.

The Benefits
The proposed FSM solution provides business benefits at many different levels. By externalizing the management logic out of the business logic and virtualizing the creation and configuration of business services, an FSM solution reduces IT costs and complexity, increases flexibility and control, and enhances accountability of all services under management. The following are the benefits of using an FSM solution organized by beneficiary groups.

Developers

• Improve service quality and develop SOBAs faster by focusing on business process logic rather than on management logic
• Save times and costs associated with managing services by automating routine steps
• Increase reuse opportunities and reduce service development costs by storing service artifacts in a dynamic repository

Operations Administrators

• Define, control, and fine-tune various services and their associated configurations in real time
• Streamline administration requirements by eliminating the need to deploy fragmented pieces of management code
• Monitor service activities in real time using the activity dashboard
• Review alerts and exceptions in real time, and act on them immediately and in an automated fashion

Line of Business and IT Managers

• Improve service quality and accelerate roll out based on unified design standards and policies across the enterprise
• Enhance customer and end-user experience by using service performance metrics and taking appropriate actions in a timely manner
• Improve regulatory compliance by providing an accountable system for tracking and monitoring services and activities within the service network in a federated manner.

Conclusion
SOA is a key strategy for improving the agility of IT investments in today's dynamic business environment. Service-oriented business applications (SOBAs) of the future will be composed using highly distributed services spanning a wide array of providers and possessing diverse characteristics. The typical approach to service management assumes full control over the services being used, is point-to-point in nature and relies on service-specific management logic, and is static due to code-driven logic. This approach is ill equipped to deal with the growing complexity of highly distributed service networks and the ever-changing landscape of business requirements.

A solution to these challenges is a federated approach for managing services through a unified management layer. Federated service management (FSM) involves virtualizing the behavior of the services and applying overarching policies to govern service interactions in a dynamic manner. The proposed FSM solution unifies highly distributed autonomous services and provides a mechanism to dynamically configure, monitor, and control them efficiently. With a FSM solution in their SOA arsenal, enterprises will be well equipped to handle the complex and dynamic nature of the business challenges of the future.