Enterprise SOA

Chapter EIGHTEEN. ESA Life Cycle Management and Operations

At this stage in the ESA evolution, it's understandable that we spent the bulk of this book focused on the construction and deployment of enterprise services rather than on life in a mature ESA environment still a decade away. But the challenges are known, and the answers are already being formulated.

It's important to understand that both life cycle management and operations are already experiencing a wrenching evolution independent of ESA's appearance on the scene. The overwhelming majority of the tools and practices developed for monitoring operations—i.e., whether the application is running normally, how busy it is, whether it's load balanced, etc.—were designed for an IT environment filled with homogenous, standalone entities...the world of SAP R/3 and its fellow monolithic applications. In that environment, the tools for installing, configuring, maintaining, and monitoring applications were built with the assumption that the only applications and systems that would be affected by further configuration, applying patches, or full-fledged upgrades were the ones receiving the changes. Not much thought was given to interdependencies because there weren't many.

But that began to change in recent years, as first application-to-application integration and then the arrival of integration platforms such as SAP NetWeaver, as well as the wild proliferation of hardware stemming from mergers and acquisitions, best-of-breed investments, ...