SOA Best Practices

Key Findings:

  • Service-oriented architectures built upon open, standards-based Web Services provide a strategic IT direction businesses need to meet their fundamental business goal: agility.
  • By 2010, ZapThink expects 69% of the total enterprise software market to be Service-oriented.
  • The overall market for products and services that support Service orientation will be over $98 billion by 2010.
  • Reworking existing brittle, high-cost IT infrastructures into flexible, Service-oriented architectures promises substantial long-term cost savings and revenue opportunities through increased business agility.
  • Service orientation represents the latest distributed computing approach to affect IT — the fourth major shift since the mid-twentieth century.
  • ZapThink predicts that companies will begin to accept Service orientation in 2003, and it will become the dominant distributed computing approach by 2006.

Table of Contents:

  • I. Report Scope
  • II. Context for Service-Oriented Architectures
    • 2.1. What is a Service-Oriented Architecture?
      • 2.1.1. Evolution of Distributed Computing
    • 2.2. Business Motivations for SOAs
      • 2.2.1. The Economics of Business Agility
  • III. Foundations of SOA
    • 3.1. SOA Foundation: Model-Driven Architecture
    • 3.2. SOA Foundation: Agile Methodologies
    • 3.3. The SOA Metamodel
    • 3.4. The 4+1 View Model of SOA
  • IV. Best Practices of SOA
    • 4.1. Develop a top-down, extended enterprise SOA
    • 4.2. Build & maintain a platform independent Service model
    • 4.3. Maintain feedback at all points of the architecture
    • 4.4. Follow Agile Methodology principles & techniques within the context of the Service model
    • 4.5. Encapsulate existing/legacy functionality
    • 4.6. Embrace heterogeneity/follow a federation model of software
    • 4.7. Compose atomic Services into coarse-grained business Services
    • 4.8. Build for consumability/broad applicability
    • 4.9. Perform ad hoc upgrades
    • 4.10. Prioritize SOA transition activities on the fly
  • V. Conclusions
    • 5.1. Key Notes
    • 5.2. Decision Points
    • 5.3. Best Practices
    • 5.4. Figures
    • 5.5. Tables
    • VI. Profiled Vendors

SOABestPractices-022003-ZTF-WS116-1