Table of Contents

Secrets of SOA provides long awaited insights on implementing service-oriented architecture — written by the leading experts in the field!

  • Secrets of SOA is written for IT professionals and executives at organizations of every size and industry who need to understand and harness the huge potential of this rapidly emerging infrastructure.
  • The book's first seven chapters are targeted at executive management and focus on the business impact of service-oriented architecture deployment decisions with an emphasis on cost, flexibility, and the ability to maintain business objectives.
  • Each of these chapters explores a different topic that illustrates the value of a physically integrated SOA infrastructure organized at the enterprise level. Taken together, they demonstrate why enterprise-level planning, backed by a centralized deployment strategy, is essential to the success of SOA.
  • The second half of the book explores specific IT issues raised by SOA and why these issues are best dealt with on an enterprise level.
  • Among the topics covered in these chapters are virtualizing resources, managing heterogeneous workloads, maintaining data and transactional integrity, and the value of keeping applications close to the data they access.

Secrets of SOA contents:

  • Foreword
    By Eric Knorr and Steve Fox
  • Chapter 1: Service-Oriented IT: The Goal is Within Our Grasp
    By Paul DiMarzio
    Only time will tell whether or not SOA is the Holy Grail for which technologists have quested. However, according to this author, the stars really have aligned this time.
  • Chapter 2: The SOA Information Manufacturing System
    By Terry Keene
    By understanding its origins and potential applications, enterprises will come to view IT as a business-enabler and not a profit drainer.
  • Chapter 3: Making Software Reuse a Reality
    By William Buckingham
    While simple in concept and with obvious advantages, the reuse of various pieces of software is not often standard operating policy. This chapter discusses how to overcome difficulties inherent in software reuse.
  • Chapter 4: The Enterprise View of Business Process Serving
    By Terry Borden & Bill Mitlehner
    The interdependency of many applications provides challenges for companies willing to adopt service-oriented architecture. One approach is to allow tasks to be crafted differently to create or modify business processes.
  • Chapter 5: The Physically Integrated Enterprise
    By Martin Kennedy
    For the many organizations investing in or contemplating a distributed server environment, it may be time to reconsider the mainframe.
  • Chapter 6: The Intelligent SOA Management Hub
    By George Galambos
    SOA, at its foundation, is managed not unlike any other large, complex workload. But there are differences in systems management necessary to make this new technology work at its best.
  • Chapter 7: The Secure, Resilient Business System: A Balancing Act
    By Bill O'Donnell
    The author explains why adoption of SOA compels all contributing enterprises to expand and tighten both their security environments, as well as resiliency and continuity strategies.
  • Chapter 8: Big Iron/Little Iron
    By Rory Canellis & Joseph Temple
    Deciding on the proper platform[s] and ways to scale resources with an SOA project can be daunting. But it can be done.
  • Chapter 9: The Art of 'Virtualizing' Resources
    By Les Wyman
    In this chapter, the author outlines what can be accomplished for an emerging class of SOA applications using his vast experience developing IBM's System z mainframe virtualization technologies.
  • Chapter 10: Managing Heterogeneous Workloads
    By Robert Vaupel & Chris Vignola
    This chapter describes how consolidating the many elements of SOA composite applications into a single workload management domain can improve the efficient utilization of resources in the face of constantly variable consumption patterns.
  • Chapter 11: Securing the Enterprise
    By Gary Puchkoff & Mike Kearney
    Companies seeking a protected environment for SOA workloads must understand it's now individual messages, not just applications, which must be secured.
  • Chapter 12: Governance: Maintaining Control
    By Mike Benson & Daniel Kaberon
    Some IT functions are best implemented in a distributed model. However, SOA governance seems to lend itself better to a more centralized approach to maintain better and tighter control over critical aspects.
  • Chapter 13: What It Takes to Make an Enterprise Resilient
    By Brian Woods
    The interdependence of systems involved in service-oriented architecture calls for a more durable enterprise. This chapter provides guidance to reach that state.
  • Chapter 14: Maintaining Data and Transactional Integrity
    By Maryela Weihrauch & Steve Wood
    Existing enterprise applications represent a rich stream of untapped potential for reuse in SOA solutions. The authors show how to do it without compromising data integrity.
  • Chapter 15: The Value of Proximity
    By Mike Cox & Carl Parris
    Deploying as many elements of SOA composite applications as possible in the same server operating image produces real advantages for the enterprise. This chapter describes these advantages and explores ways in which they can be realized.