Oracle OpenWorld: Five Steps to Better SOA Governance with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.
I’m having to recreate this post thanks to a bug in WordPress for the iPhone which managed to eat a couple posts, so my apologies for it being a bit shorter than hoped, since I had to recall what I was typing live.
In this session, James Kao from Oracle presented five steps to improving SOA governance. The core premise that was emphasized throughout is that the use of metadata is becoming more and more prevalent in the development world, as it is necessary to increase the efficiency of our development efforts. Examples include SCA descriptors and BPEL. We will have a big problem, however, if the operational tools can’t keep up with these advances. This same metadata needs to be leveraged in the run-time world to improve our operational processes. I’ll add to this that while much of the metadata is coming out of the SOA and BPM technology space, this concept should not be limited to just those areas. The concept of having metadata that describes solutions for gains in both the design time world and the run time world is extremely important.
The five steps presented were:
- Assess. (sorry lost the details on this one)
- Discover. This is where the metadata created at design time is leveraged to set up appropriate run-time governance.
- Monitor. The systems must be instrumented appropriately, exposing metrics, in addition to leveraging external monitors to collect information about run-time behavior.
- Control. The four examples given here were policy management, service management, server/service provisioning, and change management. Clearly, this is the actionable step of the process. Based upon the data, we take action. Sometimes that action is reflected in changes to the infrastructure via provisioning and/or change management, sometimes that action is modifications to the policies that govern the systems.
- Share. Finally, just as the metadata from design time played a role in the run time world, the metrics collected at run time can play a role in other processes. The information must be shared into systems like Oracle BAM or Oracle ER to provide a feedback loop so that appropriate decisions can be made for future solutions.
I was very impressed with James’ grasp of the space. While this session presented concepts and not a live demonstration, if Oracle Enterprise Manager can make these concepts a reality in a usable manner, this could be a very powerful platform for companies leveraging the red stack. Excellent talk.
2 Responses to “Oracle OpenWorld: Five Steps to Better SOA Governance with Oracle Enterprise Manager”
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This is a good list, but is missing a critically important element — the requirement to be able to track transactions in real time. The list mentions metrics, but it is missing how to detect and handle failures.
Although (performance) metrics are helpful, it is often most critical to deal with issues and failures with individual transactions since that’s typically where money is on the line.
You need to be able to detect both technical failures (faults, etc.) as well was business failures (a grossly misconfigured transaction). A recent, good example is British Airways selling roundtrip tickets to India for $40. Hundreds of tickets where sold before anyone noticed. Instead, you need a way to monitor each transaction for, in that case, an international roundtrip ticket for less than $200 or some other limit.
The speaker actually did address the ability to track single instances of execution as a part of the strategy. I would also argue that the ability to alert and take action is part of the “control” step.