Eight major pitfalls of SOA implementation

As SOA becomes the IT trend, more and more SOA projects are launched. Some projects have failed completely, and some projects have succeeded. How to learn the lessons of these failed projects and develop the vision and strategy you need to plan your SOA roadmap will be key to the success of future SOA projects. Here we gather the eight pitfalls of SOA implementation that we have noticed since last year, and we hope to provide you with a reference for SOA implementations.

8 Disconnect from the SOA marketplace

Few areas of the IT market are as diverse as the SOA domain. Any SOA plan needs to take into account the current market situation and trends to determine which platform technologies are being invested and which to wait.

For Web services based SOA implementations, there are many products and platform technologies to choose from. As many users like to evaluate and choose different technologies to achieve the route, the SOA market competition will also be intensified. From the Web services perspective, one consideration of the technology market is how the product provider treats the various Web service specifications that are now in the development phase. Vendor diversification and the proximity of various platforms to open label technologies are key considerations for SOA implementation plans, but these are often overlooked and lead to erroneous decisions and investments.

7 Missing Web service security plan

Many Web services based SOA implementations tend to start small projects, and the degree to which Web services technology is applied is often limited to the knowledge and mastery of the technical framework by developers and architects in a given environment. Once Web services technology dominates the IT architecture, access control of information security and shared services is also on the agenda. The Web Services security framework establishes a universally accepted security model that is based on a range of specifications and ultimately becomes an important component of all levels of service-oriented applications and enterprise IT architectures.

Even if your platform vendors fail to provide enough Web services security support, and even your current implementation based on SSL meets your needs, we advocate keeping a close eye on potential changes and requirements. Any plan that lacks security considerations for Web services will inevitably result in refactoring or even two of development. This problem becomes even more serious if the Web Services security issue is considered only after a drastic increase in the number of service applications.

6 lack of service management plan

In the process of adopting SOA, the enterprise organization will face how to control and manage, and evolve the increasing number of service applications. This problem is more pronounced when an enterprise accelerates the development of reuse services and increases the sharing of service applications accordingly. SOA governance challenges many aspects of enterprise organization, such as resource allocation, the role of IT staff, internal standards, processes, and project cycles. The lack of SOA governance initiatives will surely result in the failure of any large-scale SOA implementation.

5 lack of understanding of SOA performance requirements

Loose coupling is a price to pay. The introduction of a Web services based SOA introduces a multi-tiered architecture of data processing and thus provides additional performance overhead. When SOA is applied on a large scale, the communication traffic based on the message grows accordingly, and the performance problem will be highlighted at this time. As a result, any successful SOA implementation requires a good understanding of the performance requirements and infrastructure performance limitations of various IT applications. This means a lot of testing of message processing capabilities, and a close attention to service design to balance the various factors that affect performance.

4 lack of overall consideration of XML data formats

XML is the core of the SOA implementation based on Web services. The specification of XML is the basis for Web Service specification standards. Many SOA implementations focus too much on data transfer between services, ignoring the design of both data structures and efficacy. This omission is bound to lead to an improper implementation of the XML data format layer, and the impact of its flaws will ripple across all facets of the SOA application.

3 Missing migration Plan

Lack of migration planning can significantly reduce the chances of successful SOA deployments, as the deployment and design of many services will lead to a rethink of the infrastructure. The migration plan allows organizations to implement SOA in a controlled and phased manner, and plan from the technical, architectural, and organizational levels.

Typical SOA migration initiatives include impact analysis (SOA changes to existing resources, processes, special standards, and technologies), migration architectures (SOA implementation phases of architecture and its ultimate goal architecture), and Opportunity and risk analysis (considering the prospects and risk opportunities for Web and related technologies).

2 lack of internal standards for SOA

A true SOA implementation needs to be developed and followed by a rigorous set of internal design standards. Lack of standards will lead to many problems, including incompatible data formats and irregular service interfaces. A rigorous set of internal standards ensures that the design of the encapsulated backend logic is unified with the service interaction.

1 SOA implementation with traditional distributed architectures

The primary pitfall of SOA implementations is to implement service-oriented applications with traditional distributed architectures and to assume that SOA has been implemented. SOA is not CORBA + XML, much less asp.net+wse. For service-oriented and object-oriented, object-oriented component logic is far from suitable for service-oriented application environments. SOA is a completely different type of architecture based on service oriented, a different design paradigm. Understanding these differences correctly is the key to achieving SOA.

Note: Some of the concepts in this article come from the book "Ervice-oriented architecture:concepts, Technology, and Design", by Thomas Erl, by Prentice Hall/pearson PTR publishes. For more information, please visit www.soabooks.com.