Soa Testing:
CIOs and IT experts are facing ever increasing new requirements from the business experts for extending their services to be available everywhere around the world. Under cost pressure they need to consolidate data centers and business applications plus they need to pay attention to new compliance rules and security regulations. IT has to support the extended enterprise (Fig 1) which does not end any more at the doorstep of the data center or any organizational boundaries of an enterprise any more. Company employees, business partners and customers are all endusers of IT and demand secure and low response time access to business applications from wherever they are. In addition, web-service style message traffic in between application components is very much on the rise due to the need to facilitate inter- and intra company business application integration. The network becomes the increasingly important glue in between more and more globally distributed and used business application components and end-users.
SAP addresses modern business needs through enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) architected solutions. Naturally these solutions run on-top of the Network which comprises out of the internal data center local area networks (LAN) as well as intra company and Internet Wide Area Network (WAN) connections. To no small extent the performance of the network can impact the performance of an overall application+network IT landscape. When allowing access to SAP® business applications over Wide Area Networks security requirements are usually high. However, adding secure communication features often reduce network and application performance as well.
In the end the business requirement for global use of SAP business application adds new requirements to a global IT infrastructure compared to traditional 1990’s ERP solutions which were deployed and used mostly within the same local location.
This leads to the question on how to test global enterprise SOA deployments. Functional and conventional stress testing of application components in a LAN environment is still needed in order to prepare new application deployments for productive use. However, some testing should be added to ensure proper optimization of communication across Wide Area Networks as well as with the added overhead of security features.
Within the Enterprise Services Community program, some network equipment vendors, a test tool vendor and SAP came together to perform hands-on testing of a WAN distributed enterprise SOA application landscape. This initiative ran under the name ENL which stands for ES-Community Network test LAB. The testing approaches and methodologies, which reached far beyond conventional application testing, are described in this paper and are the desired method for testing any enterprise application prior to deployment across the WAN.
2 Elements of a Productive Enterprise SOA Landscape
2.1 Typical Enterprise SOA architecture
In order to understand the WAN impact on SAP business solutions based on enterprise SOA, it helps to see in some detail how an enterprise SOA IT landscape develops out of business requirements. The typical enterprise SOA elements might be characterized the following way: __ Using integration components as part of the application platform (Fig. 2a). Examples of integration components are the SAP NetWeaver Portal component, for giving end users unified access to all business applications they have to use for their work, the SAP Net- Weaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) component, for consolidated reports on all business transactions, and data from the SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) component, as one source of truth for master data records, which are needed by multiple application components.
__ Using composite application components to quickly build, deploy and use new business scenarios, which leverage access to multiple backend application systems. (Fig. 2b)
__ Use of standard web-services for communication of different application components with each other (Fig. 2b). Available Web Services for building composite applications are listed in Enterprise Services Repository.
