Chapter 14
The SOA Service Manager
In This Chapter
Getting to know SOA service management
Figuring out the plumbing
Discovering what the SOA service manager does
We have a confession to make: As of yet, you actually can’t go out and buy a SOA service manager, per se. A SOA service manager is a more robust concept that describes a product that comprises a set of capabilities you need to connect services quickly so they act as and run as a well-constructed system. Basically, the service manager is the orchestrator that makes sure that all the underlying end-to-end business services work how they were intended to work. (Someday these capabilities might be available as a solution, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.) Before we talk about the technologies that are important, you need to think about what comes first: the contract. In essence, to manage SOA services, you need to create a contract between those people providing services and those who are going to use or consume services. Like any contract, it has to clearly define the responsibilities of each party involved in the contract. Otherwise, there is chaos, which is a bad thing in the world of SOA.
In this chapter, we explain why you need to be able to orchestrate all these business services together. We help you understand that for SOA to work in the real world, it needs to behave and act as though it were an integrated system. This is more complicated than traditional systems management because you’re managing ...
