SOA Deployment Challenges

The challenges of deploying SOA can be categorized as: technical and operational.

Major technical challenges are:
• Debugging and tracing
• Efficient caching of requests and sessions
• Security, monitoring and notification
• Compliance with multiple computing standards
• Support for internal and external clients with different needs
• Quality of service and management of service-level agreements
• Availability and scalability
• Decomposition of existing applications and migration of legacy services

Major operational challenges are:
• Version control
• Learning curve for deployers
• Effects on existing operational tools and environments
• Pressures for timely releases
• Governance, especially in the face of constant changes
• Consistency in development, test and prod environments

Resolving the challenges is an ongoing battle. These challenges can be faced with the help of following:
• Lightweight, composite, layered and high-performance SOA platform
• A unified testing framework
• Decomposition of model-driven services
• An extensive authentication and authorization process for security ( such as eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML)-based)
• A strong yet flexible governance process through a service registry and repository
• Business rules are in Rule engine
• Robust forensic (monitoring, audit, logging and notification) framework
• Change management for dependencies and backward compatibility