LISA whitepaper series

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1 LISA whitepaper series Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA Quality John Michelsen Founder and Chief Architect itko, Inc. Edition Date: 9/28/2006 Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 1/

2 Business Continuity: The New 5 9 s of SOA A dozen years ago, a recurring nightmare used to make CIO s lose sleep: the terrible cost risks of system downtime on business. Even 0.1% downtime represented almost 9 hours of missed operations, a damaging blow for companies with mission-critical customer needs. Business management therefore dictated that IT solution providers meet their goal of the 5 9 s % availability from an uptime perspective. Hefty budgets went toward ensuring that servers supporting critical applications didn t fail, and that solid bandwidth was available. The funny thing about achieving those last extra decimals nearing perfection was that getting to % uptime was multiple times the cost and effort of getting to 99.9%. This fundamental trend still exists today in almost any IT environment ensuring near-perfect service levels comes at a premium. Over the years, hardware vendors and network service providers answered the challenge with system testing, redundancy, secure facilities, power backup, and all of the contingencies that would help companies finally take uptime for granted. The once astronomical cost of achieving 5 9 s on the servers became more of a commodity you could build or buy. (Run a search now for uptime and you ll see stuff like Reliable Website Hosting. Over % uptime, $13.75/month. Maybe that s pushing the claim too far for the price.) Mainframes were eventually known for their reliability because of this fact, and they still are part of almost any company s infrastructure, if the company has been around for more than 10 years. Next, the 5 9 s for Client-Server So did the CIO s get a break from their 5 9 s nightmares? No, because as we moved into the client/server world in the 1990s, we started distributing software logic more into databases and clients, and there arose a new 5 9 s issue. Now the real risks appeared in the arena of Application Performance, where software consists of more distributed parts instead of the now reliable, but far less flexible, monolithic mainframe. Stat Shot System Uptime vs. Maximum Downtime Uptime Percent Maximum Downtime per Year Six nines % 31.5 seconds Five nines % 5 minutes 35 seconds Four nines 99.99% 52 minutes 33 seconds Three nines 99.9% 8 hours 46 minutes Two nines 99.0% 87 hours 36 minutes One nine 90.0% 36 days 12 hours A new class of solutions from TIBCO, BEA, Tivoli, Topaz, and others started tackling the performance issues of code running on application servers. As applications became more distributed, performance was determined at the point where the machine is actually within software running on top of the server layer. One leading financial company CTO recently told us: Our differentiator to customers used to be the quality of our application infrastructure. Competition was really about who had the reputation and the ability to deliver % reliability, in terms of placing the trade faster than with the other guys. And this wasn t just our company, it was a C-level initiative at every one of our peers. But as more companies solidify application performance, it moves from a strategic advantage, to the ante for entering the game. What will be the next competitive differentiator? Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 2/

3 Moving from Client-Server, to Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Adoption of SOA initiatives is growing rapidly among enterprises. According to analysts Aberdeen group, 90% of major companies are already engaged in, or the midst of or planning, an SOA initiative this year. [For more details on SOA itself, we highly recommend downloading the itko whitepaper The 3 C s of SOA Testing available at Many of the common elements required to successfully achieve SOA strategies are now in place, and these technologies fall into one of two categories: SOA Governance solutions, such as policy management, registries, data and transaction management that enable the business to define the behavior and workflows expected of SOA; and SOA Development solutions, providing the means to build, integrate and test all of the newly developed and legacy components that make up the infrastructure of an SOA. This is accomplished at the component design and deployment level, as well as the overall application lifecycle level. The real issue today is that our ability to design and deploy SOA has outstripped our ability to ensure functional quality and performance integrity across the entire application as it changes. This is why Gartner s latest Hype Cycle for Web Services and SOA (2005) predicts many IT organizations face disillusionment when it comes to getting value out of SOA. Fortunately there are strategies to counter these doldrums for groups with the discipline to maintain quality throughout their architecture. The next frontier of the 5 9 s is achieving % functional integrity in a heterogeneous, evolving and interdependent SOA environment a dream that wouldn t have been possible without the preceding trends toward system and application performance. Functional Integrity as a Differentiation Goal. Building upon the increasing reliability of systems and applications infrastructures, SOA exposes a new need for managing risk at a business continuity level. As business workflows are assembled through more complex interactions between components within an SOA, there is an additional need for business validation. The latest acronym: SOBC The new fail-safe SOA requires is called Service-Oriented Business Continuity (or, SOBC). Business Continuity capabilities provide the enterprise with live, constant functional testing and performance monitoring of critical business workflows AND all of the components and communications within these highly distributed, interdependent systems. In an SOA world, applications are no longer developed and deployed as siloed projects. An SOA application is a business workflow that is literally consumed at runtime as the sum of several interdependent services and legacy components. Ideally the interaction of all these services is managed or governed by policy layers and transaction rules that help the business keep track of Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 3/

4 what the application should do. We already have the means to get the vaunted 5 9 s (or % availability) out of our infrastructures. SOA Governance can drive home the policies, and supply the workflows and data we expect within our applications. SOA Development practices can build on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and agile practices, and leverage and reuse technologies as components to meet those business requirements. But what if the application isn t functioning properly for customer needs in deployment? Better SOBC management is needed to ensure that these composite systems are actually functioning and continuing to meet business requirements. Due to the changing nature of the many components that can make up a workflow, businesses need the ability to test the user-facing application under the covers, and diagnose the root cause of problems as the architecture evolves. Equally as important to fixing problems is the ability to simulate what if problem scenarios that may occur in a highly interdependent SOA when a change is made. A SOBC should provide this simulation and monitoring capability on a constant basis. SOA literally creates a new 5 9 s challenge for companies that need to go beyond the system and application performance level. Mind you, we re not knocking the importance of great performance without it we couldn t even think about relying on something like SOA. The problem now, is that anyone can buy 5 9 s on their infrastructure, but there is no guarantee that the applications will behave in the real world as reliably as the servers and network they run on. The real business risk lies in the functional integrity of these new composite applications as they are continually consumed and evolving. This is where outages will now occur. Think of your IT department as a loading dock. You got better equipment, trained your staff and now you ve gone 365 days accident-free. But are you sending out the right products? Too many misunderstandings and the department quickly becomes unprofitable. The functional integrity of your application is the customer s perception of 5 9 s. Your services are constantly changing and highly interdependent, so you need to know if they are creating circumstances that generate faulty results for that customer. Deployed applications may seem to be running fine as far as response time, but we need to go beyond the simple math of Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 4/

5 thinking that 5 9 s in your infrastructure and application performance layers translates into business continuity for SOA. How to achieve 5 9 s in SOBC It s a given that we need to think of software from a customer experience point of view and not just a systems view. But how can you do that with so many underlying interdependent services, and distributed teams responsible for different parts of a workflow? In SOA, most of the components you rely on for business logic do not have a customer-facing UI you can test. Your infrastructure can be at 5 9 s, the database can be up and running, your website can appear to work, but as far as the customer is concerned, the app is down if the transaction didn t go through correctly! What is needed is a way for SOA Governance initiatives to fully verify that policies are meeting business requirements as they are executed by development teams and partners in the real world. SOA Development processes need to provide real time visibility and issue resolution within the ever-changing technology layers that make up SOA, so it can sustainably support the business as it naturally evolves. The requirements of Service Oriented Business Continuity (SOBC) Reporting & KPIs I should be able to continually improve my overall quality and functional integrity by interpreting the results and finding areas for future improvement. Alerting/Workflow Problem Detection Visibility Administration If a problem is detected, alerts are launched and routed to the appropriate groups or service owners and managed so the issue can be resolved. If any of the components and services (internal or external) are not functioning to requirements, we are continually monitoring them to detect the problem. I should be able to look at the functional status of the business workflows within my system at any given point in time. I have the ability to rapidly test and manage the expected business workflows within my SOA in a highly reusable way on top of my current development, deployment and governance platforms. The key here is the business continuity requirement of SOBC. To ensure business continuity, all of the services and components that are part of an SOA application must be continually monitored, tested and reported on, since they are constantly changing. Think of it like a sensory system for your SOA. It takes some of the concepts of unit, regression and load testing into account, which can be scheduled, true, but the wiring of Business Continuity testing is more about constant awareness of business issues (or stimuli) within your SOA that could signal a problem. itko LISA 3.5: Enabling the 5 9 s as well as the 3 C s itko LISA 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform ensures component and integration quality while testing, releasing and deploying enterprise software in today s complex, heterogeneous and distributed SOA development environments. With LISA in place, the business continuity expected of services-based software can keep pace with the organization s ability to rapidly and flexibly develop and deploy SOA. Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 5/

6 Building on the 3 C s of SOA Quality within LISA 3 LISA 3.0 enabled the Three C s of SOA quality: Complete, Collaborative and Continuous testing. The entire team could use LISA to test every component of an SOA system, at every phase in the development and deployment lifecycle, with rich functional and load test suite scheduling and metrics capabilities. itko LISA helps companies attain higher overall SOA quality levels and faster development by enabling the three C s of SOA testing: 1. Complete testing of business workflows across every heterogeneous technology layer of the SOA, at both a system and component level. 2. Collaborative involvement of the whole team in quality. Enable both developers and nonprogrammers to define and share test cases that prove how the SOA meets business requirements during the entire application lifecycle. 3. Continuous validation of a changing SOA deployment as it is consumed at runtime, ensuring that business requirements will continue to be met as the system dynamically changes. For more information on why the 3 C s are key to SOA quality, please read the related itko whitepaper at What s New in LISA 3.5 The Catalyst for Business Continuity In addition to increasing the Complete dimension of testing to include more legacy and third-party components, LISA 3.5 provides more support of test processes and third party development tools that enable the Collaboration expected to deliver a quality SOA app, while greatly increasing the depth of Continuous testing required for ensuring that SOA meets business requirements as it changes and evolves. LISA 3.5 will truly be a catalyst for change in allowing businesses to move toward SOA with confidence. Business Continuity = Continuous Testing with LISA The game-changing new feature of itko LISA 3.5 is known as Continuous Testing Service (or CTS). LISA s CTS provides the enterprise with live, constant functional testing and performance monitoring of critical business workflows and all of the components and communications within these highly distributed, interdependent systems. Finally there is a way to bridge the gap between SOA governance and policy initiatives, and SOA Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 6/

7 development and management processes. LISA 3.5 provides transparency for testing the entire SOA architecture as it continually evolves. Due to the changing nature of the many components that can make up a workflow, businesses need the ability to test the user-facing application and diagnose the root cause of problems as the architecture evolves. Equally as important to fixing problems is the ability to simulate what if problem scenarios that may occur in a highly interdependent SOA when a change is made. LISA s SOBC provides this simulation and monitoring capability on a constant basis. In addition, LISA 3.5 advances test efficiency and coverage with several key new features that improve the complete and collaborative nature required for successful SOA design and deployment, such as remote server testing, native test harnesses for more legacy and third-party components (CORBA being a popular one), and enhanced reporting, alerts and test metrics for both build/regression suites and running load and performance tests. Conclusion Businesses continually demand more agility and flexibility from software, and SOA strategies provide a promising answer to this challenge. Unfortunately the mission-critical runtime quality of our resulting composite apps currently fails to keep pace with our ability to design and deliver them. Fortunately there are answers available to companies with the discipline to rethink and enforce better testing practices. This paper addressed the 5 9 s % reliability as it relates to SOA apps. We re familiar with the importance of IT s efforts to date associated with achieving near-perfect execution at a system and application level. Now, the better we get at wiring Business Continuity into SOA, the better we will become at the process of driving down the difficulty and cost of maintaining applications in deployment at the % level required for a competitive solution. itko s LISA Complete SOA Testing software provides a valid solution to Business Continuity for SOA software. LISA s Continuous Testing Service interface goes beyond typical unit and functional tests to trap for the unintended consequences that inevitably occur as an application is consumed at runtime. In order to compete in today s business, companies need to rally around business continuity. Customers might be attracted by a well-known brand, but that brand will not differentiate itself through better infrastructure alone. In the end, reliable business outcomes and functional integrity are the customer experience. So we invite you to join the battle for % and make your business stand out. About the Author: John Michelsen, Founder & Chief Architect, itko, Inc. John has more than fifteen years of experience as a technical leader at all organization levels, designing, developing, and managing large-scale, objectoriented solutions in traditional and network architectures. He is the chief architect of itko's LISA automated testing product, and a leading industry advocate for software quality. Before forming itko, Michelsen was Director of Development at Trilogy Inc., and VP of Development at AGENCY.COM. He has been titled Chief Technical Architect at companies like Raima, Sabre, and Xerox while performing as a consultant. Through work with clients like Cendant, Microsoft, American Airlines, Union Pacific and Nielsen Market Research, John has deployed solutions using technologies from the mainframe to the handheld device. Copyright 2006 itko, Inc. All rights reserved. Business Continuity: The 5 9 s of SOA 7/