Recently started the Oracle program: Are You The Smartest.
For me it is an opportunity to test my current knowledge level and to extend my knowledge.
After every session I follow, I will write a brief summary as part of the preparation for the test.
I also follow some of the 2012 sessions. These sessions are not part of the test.
I will continue with the summary of the following session.
ARCHITECTS TRAINING – SERVICE INTEGRATION – Technical Case Study – The SOA Challenge.
This session (not part of the tests) was divided into the following two parts.
- Overview of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Stack (60 minutes)
- Customer Case Study: Telenet (70 minutes)
Recent years I had a fulltime job working with OFM. This made me doubt to follow this session. But eventually I decided to listen to the recording. As expected most of the content was on hand knowledge. But there were enough interesting parts in the presentation to make me decided to write this summary. So let’s start.
Oracle Fusion Middleware
Focus in this presentation will be on SOA & Process Management.
SOA Benefits:
- Improve Time-to-Market
- Drive Down Costs
- Improve Customer Service
- Expand Channels
- Drive Process Improvements
- Enable Business Visibility
- Comply With Regulations
- Accelerate M&A Integrations
SOA becomes more mainstream. As a result of this, also the type of questions customers ask are changing. Primarily it changes from: ‘do I need SOA‘ into questions like:
- How can I do SOA?
- How can I do it more efficiently?
- What products do we need?
- What vendor should I pick?
So there’s a shift in audience and expectations (like performance, stability and maintainability).
The challenges we face
- efficiency – both in development and operations
- visibility – e.g. reuse of components, monitoring (end-to-end)
- agility – time to market
- customer satisfaction – it’s very important, but difficult to measure. There are all kind of indicators. Which one are relevant in the particular Business Case?
Integrate Virtualize
A Service Bus is used as an virtualization Layer (to the available services). The Service Bus takes care of routing and transformation. Request are handled one-by-one.
Data Integrator / GoldenGate also do the routing. But not one-by-one. but in bulk updates.
Data Integrator move data from A to B and after that is does the transformation.
GoldenGate is for real time modification when moving data from A to B.
Also Service Result Caching (Coherence) might be an issue, for the following reasons:
- performance
- availability
- reliability
- service call cost
Agile Orchestration
Vertical Layers
Besides the two horizontal layers (Integrate Virtualize, Orchestrate) OFM has the following vertical layers:
- Design: JDeveloper/Composer
- Secure: Policy Manager
- Manage Monitor: EM (see picture below)
- Business Visibility: BAM
The Enterprise Manager offers End-to-end instance tracking. Even related logfile content is shown.
Benefits of Vertical layers:
- sustain consistency on all application levels
- helps to keep focus on function of layer
- can use pre-defined standards
Governance
The Registry/Repository is used to track ‘services’ for example. Might contain for example the Service status, the name of the Responsible representative.
CEP
Complex event processing is not interested in one specific event but it is about detecting ‘special’ conditions/situation in a whole load of events.
Where is all comes together
Integration is not one-size fits all. This means that it depends on the situation which toolset to use.
The growth path:
The SOA Conceptual Architecture
Oracle’s realization
Telenet: The SOA Challenge
Telenet is a cable operator in Flanders (Belqiue).
For this customer case I limited the summary to some images and a few lines of texts.
Telenet High Level Technology Stack
Telenet is using SOA to support their multi-channel strategy. All applications (mainly J2EE based) are running on WLS.
Reuse is difficult to sell in a Business Case.
It takes 50% incremental effort to create a reusable service…
… and a 20% penalty to reuse an existing service, therefore saving 80% of the development efforts
The business benefits of SOA are potentially much larger than the IT cost savings
profit is on faster Time to Market.
Using many different layers help to avoid spaghetti.
SOA Governance, why?
- Business Value
- Ensure that project investments yield business value
- Alignment
- Keep SOA aligned with the business and architecture and in compliance with business and IT policies
- Risk Reduction
- Control dependencies, manage the impact of change, enforce policies
- Cost savings
- Promote consolidation, standardization, and reuse
Telenet governance implementation
…let’s keep it practical
- …by leveraging existing practices
- E.g. extend existing project deliverables
- …by minimizing administrative overhead
- E.g. all reviews are ..checklist-based – no lengthy procedures, reports
- …by being realistic: blueprints & reference material are allowed to “evolve” (in a controlled way)
- Feedback and fine-tuning from projects explicitly taken up in governance processes
Integration Competence Center
Telenet has an Integration Competence Center which is the internal authority for al integration related topics.
Monitoring
Oracle BAM is used to monitor Business Processes.
Oracle RUEI is used to gain Real User Experience Insight. I will come back in detail about RUEI in another AYTS blog post.
