SOA Performance: Scaling SOA Implementations Now And Into The Future

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SOA PERFORMANCE
SCALING SOA IMPLEMENTATIONS NOW AND INTO THE FUTURE
ZapThink, LLC y 108 Woodlawn Road y Baltimore, MD 21210 y info@zapthink.com y www.zapthink.com SOA Performance August 2008
SOA PERFORMANCE SCALING SOA IMPLEMENTATIONS NOW AND INTO THE FUTURE August 2008 Analyst: Jason Bloomberg Abstract Many organizations look to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide greater business agility in the face of evolving business requirements and complex, heterogeneous information technology (IT) environments. To achieve this agility, architects implement a Services abstraction that loosely couples business Services from the underlying implementations of those Services. Building such an abstraction layer is not without risks, however-inherent in building such an abstraction is the risk of sacrificing performance and scalability to achieve the organization's required agility. As SOA becomes mainstream, though, enterprises simply cannot afford to trade away performance to achieve agility. As a result, architects must plan for performance up front, as part of their SOA planning process, and leverage a variety of techniques and solutions to achieve performance and scalability as well as business agility as the traffic to their Services continues to increase.
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I. Performance Challenges Facing Successful SOA Adoption For many industries, IT has become an essential part of their business. Companies rely upon IT to provide better value for customers, greater power to employees, and improved agility to the organization as a whole. Companies whose IT environments lack flexibility or cost effectiveness risk losing their competitive edge in the marketplace to firms that can creatively leverage their technology assets for competitive advantage. This increasing reliance on IT comes in the face of burgeoning complexity and business change. Companies that adapt to an ever-changing business environment are able to compete more effectively and thrive in any business climate. Such companies are particularly adept in tough economic times, often finding opportunities in the midst of chaos. Instead of being an enabler, however, IT is frequently a significant barrier to companies' ability to respond to change. To address this need for agility in the organization, many firms are turning to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - a set of best practices for organizing and managing IT resources and people to build and support Services that abstract the underlying complexity of the IT environment, providing greater power and flexibility to the business. Today, the majority of enterprises and government organizations are somewhere on their SOA roadmap. In fact, in many ways, SOA is now mainstream-enterprises have now widely adopted core SOA best practices, and organizations are looking to scale their SOA implementations to meet growing and changing Architects are looking business needs. To this end, architects are looking to their operations teams to to their operations support their SOA initiatives so that they can offer high performance as the teams to support usage of Services increases. their SOA initiatives so that they can offer Herein exists a critical problem with SOA: as an architectural approach, SOA high performance as favors agility over performance, and yet the organizations who adopt SOA require the usage of Services both. Furthermore, it typically falls on the operations team to support the in... [download for more]