Top Ten SOA Pitfalls

Reap the benefits and avoid the risks

As with any new development paradigm, the advent of SOA comes with huge potential benefits. Separating the substance from the hype can be done with thoughtful planning and risk awareness. Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid:

Don't try to boil the ocean

Do not try and convert the entire organization to a new architecture in the first phase, and don't be forced into paying for it all upfront. The most successful projects are ones that begin with fewer than 10 services, integrating just a handful of systems, and are completed in under 6 months. After the initial success, these projects typically grow incrementally.

Don't think that SOA is just a technology

SOA is not a technology that one can buy. It is a set of principles that guide how organizations design their architecture and how they use technology of any vintage to facilitate reuse. Focus on establishing reuse, and integration will come practically for free.

Don't let departments work in isolation

IT managers alone cannot dissect business processes to improve efficiency any more than business managers can rearchitect systems for a better bottom line. The analysis and planning has to be done in collaboration or the results will hit the wrong set of expectations.

Don't rip and replace

Undervaluing existing assets can be costly. Most organizations are closer to achieving a SOA than they think, and can work with and leverage what they've got create a network of services. Rather than replace old stacks with new stacks, open existing stacks to new technology.

Don't create tightly coupled services

Tightly coupled services are rarely used beyond the initial application. Services that require a specific language, protocol, or platform will challenge reusability. And reusability is one of the most sought after benefits of SOA.

Avoid vendor lock-in

Building SOA infrastructure on a proprietary vendor platform is an enormous and expensive mistake. Openness is a primary principle of SOA, and creating vendor lock-in within even a small project has the potential of affecting all future projects.

Don't forget about security

While many SOA projects begin behind the firewall, adding business-to-business connectivity is a natural extension and often a core benefit. It is important to ensure that an environment includes enterprise qualities of service, or can be easily extended to include them later.

Don't forget about management

Just like security, management is a critical enterprise quality of service that may not be needed for the initial SOA project, but will become crucial as the SOA network of services grows. And just like security, the management system needs to work across a variety of platforms to support wide-spread growth.

Don't lock yourself into a single messaging scheme

Different applications require different messaging schemes - synchronous and asynchronous, XML and binary to name a few - and different departments within an organization may have different messaging systems already installed. Restricting architects to one messaging scheme will limit growth and success.

Don't create yet-another hub

One of the great value propositions of SOA is to replace huge, monolithic applications with business processes created from a string of loosely coupled services. Unfortunately, many SOA implementations require cumbersome centralized services that threaten to erode the return on investment of many SOA initiatives.

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