Don't reinvent the wheel -- applying SOA Governance to all types of apps

kellyemo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:54:00 GMT

Calling all intrepid SOA pioneers... It's time to bask in the glow of the wisdom we've gained from cutting our teeth on SOA and share what we've learned more broadly to organizations looking at building out modern applications.

SOA brought us some major challenges -- many more moving parts to manage, dependencies built into the architectural fabric, the task of changing traditional silo'd organizations into flexible teams willing to share...but it also brought us architectural agility, interoperability, and better business-IT alignment. And, it also brought us the realization that governance is not a bad thing but can provide the flexible guidance system to help IT navigate the people, process and technology changes required by a new architectural approach.

We've been tracking the benefits of different aspects of governance as applied to SOA by way of reaching out and working with our key customers and partners and what we have been seeing is that not only are our customers having success with SOA governance but also with applying fundamental best practices and approaches of governance more broadly, across their application environments.

As we work with these customers and internally, we are seeing, more and more, the direct benefit of applying automated governance more broadly across the lifecycle of applications and we've started to document these findings in a new white paper, called "Application Governance in Action". You can download this white paper off of HP's website here.

In this white paper, you'll read about how governance can help align Application teams and operations teams to reduce the time, effort and number of errors that occur from the transition between testing/staging and application deployment. You can also read about how application governance can help keep distributed development teams coding and implementing based on desired architectural patterns and using underlying infrastructure that is in compliance with technical and support needs. The main goal of this white paper is to get you thinking. If SOA govenrance is proven to reduce the time, effort and accelerate adoption of SOA projects, what can it do for your complete modern application landscape?

Let's discuss this topic.. what do you think about the role of governance in the larger application lifecycle?

Six reasons why Governance is the right medicine for what ails the modern application lifecycle

kellyemo — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:21:00 GMT

In my last blog about governance and the application lifecycle, I mentioned I would cover six reasons why Governance can solve sticky issues for IT attempting to modernize their applications and architecture. So let’s get to it.
Reason or Challenge #1: Visibility

You can’t modernize what you can’t find…

An IT enterprise architecture team chartered with application or architecture modernization will very quickly realize that agility increases consistent with complexity, or in more basic terms.. this modernization stuff is hard. Modern approaches, while powerful and agile, also come with a lot of moving parts. The team will quickly realize they must create a manageable, known “place” for all the information related to modern applications such as shared services, consumption relationships resulting from composition (building applications by composing them from existing services rather than by scratch) and underlying dependency metadata (requirements documentation, XML schemas, and more). This virtual place must also provide insight into where services and dependencies are in the lifecycle "not just what but who, when and how", and this place must allow the info to keep up with changes and allow seamless updating (no, a large paper filing cabinet or giant binder isn’t going to cut it anymore)

Once IT commits to a modern architectural approach and their projects move from having one-to-one mappings between project definitions, requirements and purpose-built applications to the one-to-n mappings between projects defining composite applications assembled from shared services, full visibility to data needed to manage the services and artifacts through the lifecycle is critical to keep the project moving forward especially when handoffs are involved (can we say hand off from dev to test?). The risk of key information being "lost in translation" can cause the moving parts to come screeching to a halt. Modern composite applications equal many moving parts, many people involved, and many dependencies. It’s no longer going to cut it by managing all the moving parts using spreadsheets, e-mail and cell phones.

The developer building the composition must find the potential shared services they will re-use so that they don’t build a duplicate service. And, they must have visibility to the technical and business requirements that come with re-using a service—so there are no surprises (such as when they have to move to a new version of the shared service). QA must know what combination of services and policies should be tested together to validate the functional, performance and security requirements of the composite application. The operations teams must know the recommended deployment stack targeted for a service to meet SLA goals and be able to provision without guess work the run-time infrastructure to ensure SLAs are met.

This key information about a service, its requirements, dependencies, consumption expectations and resultant compositions needs to be easily accessible to those who need to know at each stage of the lifecycle. Moving to modern application architecture means providing the right information with the right people at the right time in a form they can use.

This is a new capability typically not found in traditional portfolio planning, application development, testing or management tools. Come to think about it, it sounds a lot like the capability found in SOA Governance solutions – applied to the broader concept of modern applications and their lifecycles.

Up next, challenge #2 Aligning projects with services

Making Sense of SOA Blog : SOA Governance SOA Systinet ALM

Don't reinvent the wheel -- applying SOA Governance to all types of apps

Six reasons why Governance is the right medicine for what ails the modern application lifecycle

In my last blog about governance and the application lifecycle, I mentioned I would cover six reasons why Governance can solve sticky issues for IT attempting to modernize their applications and architecture. So let’s get to it. Reason or Challenge #1: Visibility

In my last blog about governance and the application lifecycle, I mentioned I would cover six reasons why Governance can solve sticky issues for IT attempting to modernize their applications and architecture. So let’s get to it.
Reason or Challenge #1: Visibility