Taking a Clear-Eyed View of SOA

By Omri Bahat

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly gaining traction in the enterprise. However, SOA adoptation rates are still slow and experts in the field are starting to doubt the true advantages of SOA implementations. This article provides background and overview of SOA considerations, ROI, and technical advantages.

What’s the Buzz About SOA?

The fundamental concept of SOA dictates that different nodes in the network operate as mission-servers in response to client requests, such as user applications or automated management systems. Common “missions” include data retrieval, processing, and the issuance of communications or actionable commands.

Considering the fact that installing a wsdl file on an IIS to build a Web service, or running a query against a database server clearly follows the description above, is SOA really a new technology? The answer is undoubtedly "yes" and the reason lies in the abstraction layer that is offered by SOA. More specifically, the role of SOA is to guarantee the readiness of the IT infrastructure to execute technical missions that serve business demands. While the SOA approach obviously sounds promising, there are many challenges and great difficulties during and after the adoption of SOA in the enterprise.

SOA is an Architecture

Imagine a futuristic pharmaceutical company that is seeking to cure all common diseases by building an automated system that accepts biological samples as input. At its other end the system plots an already-tested FDA approved pill. Where does SOA come in? In order to process data, the system requires many database servers. Passing conclusions for collaborative nodal processing can be achieved via Web and FTP servers. Here, SOA is the physical tier that contains all databases servers, Web services, FTP servers and all other components, where each entity is wrapped with a service layer operable to accept requests and output the needed results. The communication means, protocols, interfaces, and all other technical details are boxed in the SOA tier.

Two main challenges that are encountered in every SOA implementation are already expressed in the example above. First, in order for SOA to work effectively it must be implemented throughout the enterprise network, since a partial SOA implementation still require much manual intervention, defeating the initial goal. The second difficulty arises in the application itself: Since SOA does not contain any utility intelligence, development and infrastructure teams must still compose and deploy code in order to properly train and utilize the underlying architecture.

Benefits and ROI

The key advantage of SOA is that it significantly reduces development and deployment efforts and therefore time-to-market, as well as lowers maintenance and administration costs. Programming the SOA nodes is faster and more straightforward than under non-SOA technologies; developing solutions that achieve similar goals and performance (e.g., complex threading and distributed processing) outside of the SOA framework requires much skill and expertise from individual programmers, which are often hard to find. Depending on the SOA provider, pushing changes to the physical nodes is sometimes embedded in the service tier, together with monitoring and reporting components that simplify system management. However, the SOA cost savings are only expressed over the very-long horizon as now explained.

True SOA savings is only possible after its complete implementation across the enterprise. To reach that point, enterprises must undergo significant (often one-way, since rolling back is not a possibility) transition to SOA, which is very costly. It is therefore not surprising that many technical experts doubt the realistic ROI of SOA. While the benefits are clear for very large enterprises, the advantages for SMBs are still questionable.

Existing and Upcoming Offerings

Grid computing and SOA have very much in common as both technologies serve similar purposes, namely speeding up the execution of business needs and reducing long-term IT costs. From a product prospective, several vendors already offer out-of-the-box solutions. Oracle and IBM both have infrastructure offerings for grid platforms. One leader vendor in this space that started addressing the “intelligence” problem mentioned earlier is EMC, which offers a turnkey grid solution that can be tuned according to client-specific variables. EMC’s offerings are based on the Axciom grid technology, which was acquired in January 2006. While Microsoft has not done much work in the grid (although some Microsoft grid implementations are available, such as the SSDS SkyServer and various projects at the Astrophysics department at John Hopkins University), the company has recently announced its intent to sell SOA-in-a-box.

The Data Tier

Grid architectures and SOA utilize a vast number of databases and data servers for analytical processing. Consequently, numerous technical challenges arise when managing the data tier of such networks. More explicitly, the proper operation of SOA environments relies on database administrators being able to push and pull changes and data respectively, install new databases and servers on the fly, and have complete and agile control over massive data centers. One solution to address this data administration problem is the development of administrator-dedicated SOA systems. However, considering the hierarchical structure and nodal architecture of SOA, such solutions are likely to be too expensive and may result in poor user-experience: SOA systems are most effective in offline (i.e., non-real-time) applications. On the other hand, rich user-interfaces and fast response time are required for database administrators managing the data tier of the grid.

Conclusion

Are SOA and grid really beneficial? Absolutely. After attending a presentation by Pfizer’s CTO and learning how the company reduced the computational processing relating to various pharmaceutical research tasks from six months to 20 minutes, the benefit of SOA is abundantly clear. But will SOA ever make it to the mid-market and SMBs? I personally believe that the answer to this question is up to Microsoft and depends on execution of “shrink-wrapped SOA.”

About the Author:

Dr. Omri Bahat is co-founder and director of SQL Farms. Before SQL Farms, he served as a lead database architect at Symantec (formerly Riptech, sold to Symantec in 2002). In that position, he was responsible for the development, change management, process, and database automation solutions in large SQL Server environments. Bahat is a regular speaker in software conferences, code camps, and SQL/.NET user groups. For more information about SQL Farms, go to www.sqlfarms.com.