Architecting and Building
SOA solutions
Derek Walker
Southwest System Integration, Inc.
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
Agenda
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Introduction
The Problem Space
The Evolution of Services
The Evolution of System Integration
SOA Principles
SOA – a definition
The Players - SOA Stacks
Case Study
The Truth – Hype Displaced
The Future
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
Introduction
• Southwest System Integration. Inc. is a boutique
consulting firm providing the following services:
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– SOA Architecture and System Integration specializing in SWIFT and
Healthcare
– Software Project and Program Management
– Sun Java CAPS Architecture and Implementation
– SWIFT Integrator Architecture and Implementation
– SDLC Implementation and Collaboration Software
– Commercial Software Product Development and Management
– Custom Software / Application Design and Development
– Technology Evaluation and Assessment
Notable Clients:
– SWIFT - WorldBank
– Sun Microsystems - BC Ministry of Health, Electronic Health Record
– Geisinger Medical System
– University of Medical and Dental of New Jersey
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Problem Space
• The computerization of organizations has created “silo’s of
information”, compartmentalized along business functional areas
– All with their own interfaces, protocols, data models, data formats
• The “increasingly-connected” world means that:
– organizations need to interact with outside organizations to survive, e.g. JIT
inventory, outsourcing functions like HR, trading partners
– organizations need to provide services that are coordinated responses of
many departments, i.e. “business process mash-ups”
• When an order is placed, inventory needs to be checked, then debited,
credit rating checked, ability to cross-sell checked
– organizations need to partner with others to create service offerings
– organizations need to re-act to new challenges and changes in strategic
direction quicker than before
• Lowering costs for delivering services and systems
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Problem Space – Cont.
• In short :
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It is integrating in-house systems for greater value
It is exposing services for customers and partners
It is calling services of partners and vendors
It is the need to create an “on-demand business” delivered via
networks
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Evolution of Services
• Shared Object Libraries & Dynamic Linked Libraries – first
sharing of a “service”
• Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) – functions available on host or
over TCP/IP and first networked and distributed service, technology
dependent
• point to point TCP/IP server interfaces - technology and
implementation independent
• Transaction Monitors (e.g. Tuxedo) – distributed, highly-scalable
and available services via messages and queues
• CORBA ( ~ COM) – the first technology to be a “true distributed
service”, technology and implementation independence, first to
introduce an agnostic interface definition language (IDL)
– RMI is a variant but technology dependent
• SOAP & WSDL – distributed, technology and implementation
agnostic, interface definition language (WSDL)
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Evolution of System Integration
• point to point interfaces
– typically TCP/IP
– initially all were custom, later standards (communication and messages)
developed like Health Level 7 (HL7)
• hub and spoke message brokers / appliances
– centralized server with store’n’forward, routing, translation (in a
declarative language)
– light weight connectors (clients), typically prebuilt, that support industry
standards and common COTS applications
• EAI (enterprise application integration) Suites (MOM)
– distributed, federated architecture
– pre-built adapters, message bus (some type of queuing system),
transformation via scripting or interpreted language, repository of metadata and configurations
– GUI IDE and monitoring
– ability to support web services and Business Processes
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Evolution of System Integration
• SOA/Composite Application Suite
– State of the art, differs from traditional EAI suites in that:
• queue is typically JMS (interface at least)
• application server based
• extensive Business process (BPM) support – design/IDE, execution,
orchestration and monitoring
• support for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
• ability to create composite applications with GUIs from aggregating services
• focus on web services and can act as a consumer and/or provider
• service discovery mechanism or registry (e.g. UDDI)
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
– SOA/Composite Application suites are “deemed” by some as too heavy
and too expensive so lighter version created
– Typically used to refer to a suite that supports the new Java Business
Integration (JBI) standard
– More abstraction and runtime dynamic-ism with service virtualization
– Composed of binding components, message bus, service engines,
message routers
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
SOA Principles
• Service orientation – Functionality is packaged as a set of interoperable
services.
• Service loose coupling – Services maintain a relationship that
minimizes dependencies and only requires that they maintain an
awareness of each other.
• Service contract – Services adhere to a communications agreement, as
defined collectively by one or more service-description documents.
• Service abstraction – Services hide logic and implementation.
• Service reusability – Logic is divided into services with the intention of
promoting reuse.
• Service composability – Collections of services can be coordinated and
assembled to form composite services.
• Service autonomy – Services have control over the logic they
encapsulate.
• Service discoverability – Services are designed to be outwardly
descriptive so that they can be found and assessed.
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
SOA – a definition
• The acronym is over-hyped and very “over-loaded”
• Best attempt at a definition is Thomas Erl:
“Service-oriented architecture represents an architectural model
that aims to enhance the agility and cost-effectiveness of an
enterprise while reducing the overall burden of IT on an
organization.
It accomplishes this through the positioning of services as the
primary means through which solution logic is represented.”
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Players - SOA Stacks
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Sun Microsystems – JEE, JCAPS, OpenESB
IBM – Websphere
Oracle – Fusion, BEA
Microsoft – Biztalk
Software AG – Webmethods
Tibco – ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks
OpenSource – OpenESB, ServiceMix, Mule,
Petal, WSO2 (all ESB implementations)
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Players -SOA Stacks – Cont.
• Advantage of Commercial Offerings:
– More real-world proving / testing, i.e. more robust
– Greater throughput
– Much better productivity tools, e.g. GUI
drag’n’drop, pre-built functionality
– Greater depth and breath of tools esp monitoring
– More standards support
• Advantage of Open-Source Offerings:
– Cost
– Support for Emerging Standards
– Lack of Vendor
Lock-in
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
Case Study – BC Health Information Access Layer
Repositories
SHR
DAL
LAB
Drug
DAL
DAL
Others
DAL
Registries
RAL
Orchestration Fabric
Subscription
Services
Access
Manager
RAL
RAL
Identity
Manager
FED
Independent
User
Audit
Longitudinal Record Services
Encryption
Services
Consent/
Disclosure
Log
PROV
Location
Domain
Access
Services
Index
Access
Services
RAL
Provider
EHR
Index
RAL
Client
Nomenclature
Mapping
Governance
Execution
Transaction
Execution
Governance
Aspects
Service Governance
Identity Pools
Service Facade
External Entities
POS
POS IA
TH
EMR
EHR
Viewer
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Truth – Hype Displaced
For SOA to truly succeed, business processes
must be re-engineered to support it.
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Truth – Hype Displaced
The 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing:
1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn't change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.
#1-7 Peter Deutsch, Sun Microsystems (an original Sun "Fellows") 1994
#8 James Gosling, Sun Microsystems (Sun Fellow and the inventor of Java)
1997
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Truth – Hype Displaced Continued
• Xml is unruly
– For example HL7 v3 messages, the basis of new federal healthcare network,
has literally thousands of fields, many levels of nesting with optionality. To
transform a basic lab result in v2 (~150 fields) to v3 resulted over 4000 lines
of java code.
• Web services are not high-throughput
– Especially if doing runtime schema validation in SOAP call
• The biggest of all hype – dynamic-ism & runtime config
– Impractical and absolutely undesirable in real systems. Changes in any
aspect of an “interface” or consumption of a service requires pre-notification,
planning and above all testing – complete regression and user acceptance
testing
– You may not care that your mash-up of google earth does not display quite
right because of a change but when it means transferring your pay into your
bank account things change.
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.
The Future
• Trends & Developments:
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JBI
WS-* standards
Industry Standards
Service Registries
Cloud Computing and SOA
• Issues:
– Security, Security, Security
– Service Governance (runtime)
– Semantic Interoperability
Southwest System Integration Inc. © 2009 Proprietary and Confidential.