Came across this article which compares a Thanksgiving meal to SOA.

Here are the 10 items,

1. Like a Thanksgiving meal, it takes a lot of work to put together an SOA … and no one wants to clean up the associated mess that comes with it.
2. Reuse, the next round of Web services you build are the IT equivalent of next week’s turkey sandwiches and soups. You should be getting a lot of meals out of this feast.
3. Unless you find a way to spice it up or make it savory, SOA can be dry and a lot of people around the table may quickly lose interest. Also, like a big turkey meal, too much SOA can put you to sleep.

Came across this article about the real world implementation of SOA at Standard Life. It was posted back I 2005 but demonstrates that this is not something that is new and it can certainly work.

This second article from 2006 goes on a little further by explaining that while SOA is used a lot throughout the group the bulk of the systems are still running on non-SOA systems.

There is a lot to cover when discussing what SOA actually means, how do you explain it to someone in just a few words? Not an easy one.

However one thing that constantly comes through is that SOA Governance, in particular Policy Management, can make a huge difference to the success of an implementation.

Here is a blog entry about this topic, which is extremely interesting considering that at the moment I am looking into more detail about the offering from WebLayers. This is a tool that can assist with the automation of policy checking. It comes with a large number of out of the box policies which will get you going from day one and this is something that can benefit the whole group.

Sometimes when talking to people they will just say that SOA is just EAI rebranded and exactly the same underneath. When confronted with these types of comments I will spend the time explaining why SOA is different and at the same time explain that it is not something that is new.

Came across this article today saying the same sort of thing.

There is often the thought that SOA and particularly web services, bring with them a new set of security issues. In reality most of the issues that appear are existing ones that have been around for some time, but developers have forgotten about them.

Read this article for more information on some of the common issues which need to be dealt with in this environment.

This is a useful article on some of the things to look for on a checklist relating to SOA.

Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, is a buzz phrase at the moment and lots of companies are jumping on the bandwagon. The principles have been around for some time now but it is such a huge area knowing where to start and what needs doing.

Some of the important areas to consider are;

• Governance, Registry & Policy Management
• Infrastructure such as what middleware, ESB’s
• Security
• Process management
• And much more…

There are many products out there that can help you move forwards with your SOA strategy but what is the right thing for you? This is where I can help mould that strategy in the right direction.

Over the past few months I have been involved in looking into the SOA a lot and researching different processes, methods, products etc. One of the most important aspects to come out of this work has been the importance of Governance.

I’ve broken this down into a couple main areas,
- Registry
- Policy Management

Registry
This refers to the UDDI registry where it is possible to find the list of available services. It’s all very going off and creating a bunch of services but if you can’t fund them the re-use becomes zero!! There are different ways of doing this and some places will use a simple spreadsheet to record what services are available, while others will utilise specific products.