SOA and Cloud Computing

Agility, on an organizational level, refers to efficiency with which an organization can respond to change. Increasing organizational agility is very attractive to corporations, especially those in the private sector. Being able to more quickly adapt to industry changes and outmaneuver competitors has tremendous strategic significance.

Before understanding how SOA can bring the agility to your organization, you need to get an idea of where the present complexity is and how it is effecting the agility in your organization. Some of the factors that effects agility are:

1. Technology :

We generally spend months and years to get our IT systems stabilized. We bring in a lot of software and different versions of them into out network. Sometimes for every new functionality we need, we may have to get a new software product. In the end we may face a situation where in it is difficult to find the skilled people to work on those systems. Hence the technology we use to implement our business is complex.

2. Business Process:

If you have a complex business system, obviously the implementation is complex. Many times we realize this complexity only when we started to implement it. Business functionality also contains conflicting elements due to different perspectives or applications.

3. Integration

We tend to use and combine functionality from existing systems/applications. Even if our individual systems/applications are working good, when we integrate them is a complex work and surely we get many issues.

4. Maintenance

After we go past the technology. business and integration complexities, we need a way to manage this complex environment. Updating the components we used to implement out business logic and adding new functionality is always a tedious task.

SOA can help addressing all these issues of complexity. SOA is more agile in order to react as quickly as possible to changing business environments and offer new services to customers, suppliers and partners.

• SOA can be understood without any knowledge technology used to implement it.
• SOA decomposes large systems into services and application frontends.
• The granularity of the service is well suited to gain a high level understanding of the entire system.
• SOA encourages the reuse which streamlines the code and reduce redundancies.
• in SOA every service is documented, which add the comprehensibility of SOA

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This is the basic SOA certification from IBM. It was introduced in 2008 and test code is 000-669.

Must read:This is not a kind of certification which you can just read and write. The main objective of this test is to test how much of understanding you have on SOA and its importance to business. your practical experience matters a lot.
Also, you need to have solid understanding of Enterprise Application integration (EAI), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) key concepts and how they are implemented.

Details

• Test Code: 000-669
• Number of questions: 54
• Time allowed in minutes: 90
• Required passing score: 67%
  

Objectives:
Section 1 - The Value of SOA (15%)

1. Identify business functions where SOA can improve competitiveness and productivity.
2. Identify how SOA can provide return on investment (ROI) (improve competitiveness, reduce costs, increase responsiveness.)
3. Identify the SOA features that make businesses more agile.
4. Identify the opportunity costs of not adopting SOA.
5. Identify situations where SOA does not provide the desired value or is not appropriate.
6. Identify the business drivers for SOA.

Section 2 - SOA Concepts (26%)

1. Define the concept of a service in SOA.
2. Describe the architectural concepts used in SOA (for example: loose coupling and separation of concerns.)
3. Describe the roles that XML plays in SOA.
4. Describe the role of a service registry and/or repository in SOA.
5. Explain what a business process is in the context of SOA (including business process management and automation) and how it facilitates business flexibility.
6. Determine the role that technology standards (SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, BPEL, WS-I, ) play in SOA.
7. Describe the role that Web 2.0 and its related technologies play in SOA (for example: REST and AJAX.)
8. Describe the importance of goals, KPIs, and measurement to business success with SOA.

Section 3 - Basic SOA Architecture (20%)

1. Describe the characteristics of a basic SOA architecture.
2. Describe the elements of the IBM SOA Reference Architecture, and their roles and relationships.
3. Describe the enterprise service bus (ESB) and its role in SOA.
4. Describe the role of Web services and messaging in building an SOA.
5. Describe orchestration of business processes using services and human interactions.
6. Describe the stages of the SOA lifecycle (model, assemble, deploy, manage.)

Section 4 - SOA Management (19%)

1. Explain the need for SOA governance.
2. Describe SOA governance and related concepts (roles and responsibilities, funding models, policies, enforcement, critical success factors, and metrics.)
3. Describe Quality of Service (QoS) issues pertinent to SOA.
4. Explain the need for a distributed security model (including issues like identify provisioning and propagation.)
5. Identify the impact of changes to services in the SOA lifecycle (change management, versioning, and service lifecycle.)
6. Identify the role of an enterprise service bus (ESB) in SOA management and governance.
7. Identify service management issues.

Section 5 - Preparing for SOA (20%)

1. Describe the elements of SOA governance that need to be addressed during the preparation for SOA.
2. Understand the importance of documenting business issues, drivers and goals when preparing for SOA.
3. Capture and assess IT issues, drivers, and goals (including metrics and KPIs.)
4. Describe the people, organizational, and technology factors that impact readiness for SOA and its success.
5. Describe the steps for SOA adoption (including adoption roadmaps and maturity assessments.)
6. Identify barriers to SOA adoption.
7. Describe points of entry into SOA.
8. Describe the importance of securing executive sponsorship and solving funding issues for SOA adoption.

Test Preparation:
Plenty to read for this certification. We have redbooks, some developerworks articles and few retail books.

Must read:

1. IBM SOA white paper
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-whitepaper/
2. SOA terminology
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-term1/
3. ESB
 http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-esbpat2/
4. Service Repositories in SOA
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-servrepos/
5. SOA for Dummies book
6. BPM Concepts
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-bpm1/
7. SOA in action
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-in-action/

Recommended Reading:

1. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-govframe/
2. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/newto/index.html
3.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0801_olson/0801_olson.html
4.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0806_radcliffe/0806_radcliffe.html
5. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-practical/
6. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-govern/
7. http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/soa2/