Enterprise SOA

What is life cycle management in the context of ESA?

ESA life cycle management adds two new duties to existing management of applications and management of landscapes, and those are management of services and management of composite applications. But the links between these layers are loosely coupled, unlike before. This makes it possible, as we'll discuss shortly, to administer and maintain applications, services, and the like independently of each other—the characteristic which guarantees continuous availability.

Decoupling of business logic from underlying functionality also means that for the first time, it will become possible to monitor the operations of the business process—i.e., is the operation of the process running smoothly—separately from the purely technical operation of the application or service—i.e., is it busy, is it load balanced, and so on. One of the goals of ESA life cycle management is to introduce business process awareness to life cycle management tools and procedures.