Service Oriented Enterprise


Thursday, October 20, 2005

SOA Boot Camp: Days 8 & 9  


Day 8 (Tuesday) was an interesting day. Oddly enough we were discussing service networking infrastructure (XML transformation devices, mediation and XML firewalls) - and the press release around IBM picking up DataPower came out. Well - that created a bit of discussion. Generally we agreed on a few things: 1. The deal was good for IBM and DataPower 2. The valuation of Reactivity just went up 3. Cisco needs help with AON. We also spent some time and knocked out a 'service networking buyers guide' which we will make available to our customers.



Day 9 (Wednesday) focused on 'service oriented business intelligence'. Eric Zerneke and y of Service Integrity taught us the essentials of using SIFT. This was a welcome change. We'd been spending a significant amount of time looking at the non-functional concerns of SOA that it was great to learn about a product that was much more focused on providing business value. From a geek perspective, SIFT focuses more on the information found in the SOAP body. So, many people talk about 'business services' - well, accompanying those services are 'business messages'. SIFT presents a solution for 'intercepting' business messages, applying cross-message analytics for the purpose of near-real time event resolution. Unlike traditional ETL/Cube/Analyze/Report solutions, SIFT presents information to a user when the information is still action-able (not post-mortem analysis). They also do a great job of aggregating the data and making it available to a variety of output devices (rich client, portal, etc.) One thing that I'd like to see is a closer integration into intermediaries.

posted by jeff | 1:11 PM


Tuesday, October 18, 2005

SOA Boot Camp: Days 6 & 7  

Day 6 (Saturday) focused on SOA security. We started off by reviewing the typical security concerns found in a distributed computing world: message authenticity, confidentiality, non-repudiation, distributed trust, etc. Part II reviewed the protocols available to remedy the issues: (WS-Security, XML-Signature, XML Encryption, WS-Trust, WS-Federation, SAML, TLS, etc.) Part III reviewed the actual architectural elements that implement the remedies (XML Firewalls, I&AM, Federated Identity, PKI, platform libraries (AES, etc.), intermediary based PEP's, etc. Part IV focused on the Momentum SOA reference architecture (usage of protocols, reference elements, architectural patterns & practices and use cases). At first glance, SOA security appears to be a real beast, but once you break it down it is actually not too bad.


Day 7 (Monday) was an in-depth review of 'decoupling in the network'. Frank Martinez of Blue Titan discussed the protocol resolution to the non-functional requirements of distributed computing (message formats, passed predicates, transports, reliability, security, transactional integrity, etc.) And how each of those issues can be viewed as potential coupling issues. He then addressed the use of intermediaries to mediate the differences between architectural participants. The outcome was an architectural approach that promotes consume-ability by making a service tolerant to the various requirements imposed by clients.

posted by jeff | 8:40 AM

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