IBM's SOA Foundation lifecycle
The IBM SOA Foundation is an integrated open standards-based set of IBM software, best practices, and patterns. The key elements of the IBM SOA Foundation are the SOA life cycle (model, assemble, deploy, manage), reference architecture, and SOA scenarios. IBM's SOA Foundation lifecycle consists of the following iterative phases and some of the key activities performed:
Model
Gather key business requirements, objectives, and success criteria
Model business processes based on requirements and objectives
Identify KPIs and instance metrics
Perform business process model simulations
Service discovery and identification
Assemble
Service Components Assembly based on business design
Service specification, realization, and implementation
Business process assembly and implementation leveraging new and existing services and components
End application connectivity including routing, message transformation, protocol transformation, and so on
Creating the monitoring model based on KPIs
Deploy
Preparation of the hosting/operational environment
Integration testing of solution
Software configuration management activities
Manage
Administer deployed applications, processes, services, and components
Monitor KPIs and instance metrics
Feed real-time monitor metrics to fine-tune the business process model
Plan for growth based on operational performance and metrics
User security
Govern (that spans all phases)
Process and service lifecycle governance
Ensure process controls and compliance
When developing SOA-based solutions, you can adopt the SOA lifecycle by mapping what activities are performed in which phase and also identify which tools and products can be used to fulfill activities in that phase. The lifecycle, as shown in the following figure, outlines the key IBM products that could be used to fulfill some of the key activities in each phase to deliver the solution. Products marked in bold are the ones we will be covering in this book.
