Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Autonomy and Service-Oriented Architecture

Adding policy to integration.  Phil Wainewright's 2004-05-26 Loosely Coupled blog comments on SOA management software as a means to deal with exceptions and also enforcement of business policies.  The article does not address autonomic behavior directly; it promotes discussion of how deviations can be treated from a system-management cockpit.  The lead is compelling: "SOA management software can put your business operations on cruise control, but don't fall asleep at the wheel."

The key section with relevance to management of autonomic operation is at the end, on Unexpected Errors.  The preceding section there, on concerns about breaching of layers of abstraction is also relevant.  The key overlapping concern is expressed this way, at the end of the article: "When [enterprises] automate process integration, it removes manual steps where people would previously have been on hand to spot policy breaches.  So unless policy enforcement is automated at the same time as the process itself, much of the benefit of automating the integration is lost.  Effective policy enforcement is essential to productive services integration, and customers are going to expect SOA management vendors to fulfil that need."

I don't know if SOA management will do the job, but it would seem that SOA and component models may be a good place to come to grips with failure modes and policy breaches.  I also remain concerned about interoperability and integration in the enterprise.

See also:

 Autonomy, Where Art Thou?
 MDA Lock-In?
 MDA Article: Couple of Misunderstandings

posted by orcmid at 5/26/2004 11:23:48 AM