Today, The Open Group announced three new industry standards to enable businesses to effectively integrate elements of SOA and Cloud Computing into a solution or enterprise architecture. The new standards are:
- SOA Reference Architecture
- Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework
- Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model
SOA Reference Architecture
Provides a blueprint for creating and evaluating SOA solutions. With the release of the SOA RA Standard, enterprise architects now have a common language and approach for creating SOA solutions that meet different organizational needs, and bridge the gap between business and IT.
This specification presents an SOA RA, which provides guidelines and options for making architectural, design, and implementation decisions in the implementation of solutions. The goal of this SOA RA is to provide a blueprint for creating or evaluating architecture.
Additionally, it provides insights, patterns, and the building blocks for integrating fundamental elements of an SOA into a solution or enterprise architecture.
Informally, the aim of the SOA RA is to answer some of the key questions and issues encountered by architects, including but not restricted to common questions such as:
- What are the aspects, building blocks, and layers of an SOA that I need to consider in designing solutions, establishing enterprise architecture guidelines, or assessing an architecture based on service-oriented principles?
- What are the building blocks I need to include in each layer of my solution or standardize as part of a enterprise architecture?
- What are some of the key architectural decisions I need to make when designing a solution, or assessing an architecture that is based on service-oriented principles?
- How do I increase my chances of gaining benefit from using SOA by taking into account key layers and building blocks with which I may initially be unfamiliar as our company makes it journey through higher levels of maturity? One of the ways in which we can establish a baseline and move to higher levels of maturity is to use The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) [21].
- Which roles in a project would benefit from using these principles and guidelines?
The SOA RA is used as a blueprint and includes templates and guidelines for enterprise and solution architects as well as software engineering roles within the software development life-cycle. These facilitate and ultimately enable automation and streamlining the process of modeling and documenting the architectural layers, the capabilities and the Architecture Building Blocks (ABB) within them, options for layers and ABBs, mapping of products to the ABBs, and architectural and design decisions that contribute to the creation of an SOA. It is intended to support organizations adopting SOA, product vendors building SOA infrastructure components, integrators engaged in the building of SOA solutions, and standards bodies engaged in the specifications for SOA.
More: http://www.opengroup.org/soa/source-book/soa_refarch/intro.htm
Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI) Framework
Is the first Cloud standard from The Open Group, which outlines the concepts and architectural building blocks necessary for infrastructures to support SOA and Cloud initiatives.
Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI) is the realization of this framework for the cloud. This document details the SOCCI elements, the synergies realized through the cohesive application of SOA and cloud-based principles, and the SOCCI Management Building Blocks. It expands upon the relationships between service-orientation and its application to various infrastructure components. Finally, the concepts outlined are explained in the context of a business scenario – Motor Cars in the Cloud.
Participants have specific requirements from the cloud computing infrastructure. We will be elaborating on these requirements. The relationship of the base roles (Consumer, Provider, and Developer) and composite role (Integrator) are described above.
More: http://www.opengroup.org/soa/source-book/socci/intro.htm
Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model
Delivers a common maturity model, which has now been ratified as an ISO and IEC International standard, for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses.
The Open Group SOA Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) provides consultants and IT practitioners with a means to assess an organization’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) maturity level. It defines a process to create a roadmap for incremental adoption which maximizes business benefits at each stage along the way. The model consists of seven levels of maturity and seven dimensions of consideration that represent significant views of business and IT capabilities where the application of SOA principles is essential for the deployment of services. The OSIMM acts as a quantitative model to aid in assessment of current state and desired future state of SOA maturity.
More: http://www.opengroup.org/soa/source-book/osimmv2/intro.htm
More information
- Press Release - www3.opengroup.org/news/press/open-group-publishes-new-standards-soa-and-cloud
- SOA Reference Architecture PDF - https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/jsp/publications/PublicationDetails.jsp?publicationid=12490
- Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI) Framework (SOCCI) PDF - https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/jsp/publications/PublicationDetails.jsp?publicationid=12510
- OSIMM V2 PDF - https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/jsp/publications/PublicationDetails.jsp?publicationid=12450
