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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a key strategy for IT and line of business executives to jointly
enhance business performance and agility in today’s intense corporate climate. Using the SOA methodology, business
applications are built as an assembly of loosely coupled pieces of business functionality, commonly referred to as services.
These services are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a shared services network, which is
often highly distributed within and across enterprise boundaries. Service-oriented development of distributed applications is
increasingly common as businesses seek to build and reuse services and service-based processes in new ways to
improve performance and gain competitive advantage. Gartner Group has coined the term service-oriented business
application (SOBA) to refer to a service-based approach to building distributed applications.
There are two basic entities in the development of SOBAs – service provider and service consumer. The service provider
offers services that the consumer uses and composes into a distributed application that solves a particular business
problem. Once the distributed application is established, it can in turn be offered as a service for another service consumer
to integrate.
When managing services, most businesses expect management functions to be performed at the service endpoints by a
provider that controls the platforms on which the services are hosted. Because a SOBA can be composed of highly
distributed and heterogeneous services from multiple providers, it is likely that many of the endpoints will be outside the
control of the consumer. Yet, service consumers must still apply governance principles to their distributed applications or
risk offering an unreliable and underperforming service to their business users.
To provide proper governance, the service consumer needs a way to apply its management policies and logic to the
services it consumes, regardless of the endpoints that provide them. Stakeholders across the enterprise need a unified, yet
simple, operational approach to service management that provides capabilities like:
- Support for large numbers of heterogeneous service interactions among services with diverse characteristics and
management policies
- Separation of business logic from management logic concerns
- Separation of governance responsibilities between developers and operational administrators
- Provide a view of service behavior in an end-to-end business context
- Ability to monitor and control service behavior at run-time
The only way to holistically manage autonomous, disparate, and highly distributed services is to employ a federated
approach to service management. Within a federated system, the behavioral aspects of services must be virtualized in a
unified manner from the standpoint of the applications consuming the services. This approach provides a service
consumer a standardized way of enforcing policies, best practices and other management logic at the composite business
service level, which is fully compatible with existing management logic at the service endpoint.
Properly implemented, federated service management (FSM) provides a unified method for governance between
applications, services and devices across a heterogeneous network, which will enable developers to easily create solutions
for complex distributed environments. The end-to-end view provided by FSM allows service consumers and providers alike
to understand in real time the performance being delivered, and to take appropriate actions to rectify issues related to
service quality and SLA compliance.
Federated Service Management White Paper (PDF)
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