Event-Driven Architecture: How SOA Enables the Real-Time Enterprise

by Hugh Taylor, Angela Yochem, Les Phillips, Frank Martinez

Overview

Improving Business Agility with EDA

 

Going beyond SOA, enterprises can gain even greater agility by implementing event-driven architectures (EDAs) that automatically detect and react to significant business events. However, EDA planning and deployment is complex, and even experienced SOA architects and developers need expert guidance. In Event-Driven Architecture, four leading IT innovators present both the theory of EDA and practical, step-by-step guidance to implementing it successfully.

 

The authors first establish a thorough and workable definition of EDA and explore how EDA can help solve many of today’s most difficult business and IT challenges. You’ll learn how EDAs work, what they can do today, and what they might be able to do as they mature. You’ll learn how to determine whether an EDA approach makes sense in your environment and how to overcome the difficult interoperability and integration issues associated with successful deployment. Finally, the authors present chapter-length case studies demonstrating how both full and partial EDA implementations can deliver exceptional business value. Coverage includes

 

• How SOA and Web services can power event-driven architectures
• The role of SOA infrastructure, governance, and security in EDA environments
• EDA core components: event consumers and producers, message backbones, Web service transport, and more
• EDA patterns, including simple event processing, event stream processing, and complex event processing
• Designing flexible stateless events that can respond to unpredictable customers, suppliers, and business partners
• Addressing technical and business challenges such as project management and communication
• EDA at work: real-world applications across multiple verticals

 

Hugh Taylor is a social software evangelist for IBM Lotus Software. He coauthored Understanding Enterprise SOA and has written extensively on Web services and SOA. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Angela Yochem is an executive in a multinational technology company and is a recognized thought leader in architecture and large-scale technology management. Les Phillips, VP, enterprise architecture, at SunTrust Banks Inc., is responsible for defining the strategic and business IT foundation for many areas of the enterprise. Frank Martinez, EVP, product strategy, at SOA Software, is a recognized expert on distributed, enterprise application, and infrastructure platforms. He has served as senior operating executive for several venture-backed firms and helped build Intershop Communications into a multibillion-dollar public company.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321635150
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	02/17/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hugh Taylor is a social software evangelist for IBM Lotus Software. Previously, he worked at SOA Software and Microsoft. He is the author of The Joy of SOX: Why Sarbanes Oxley and Service-Oriented Architecture May Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You and coauthor of Understanding Enterprise SOA. He is a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a frequent presenter at technology industry conferences. Hugh earned his BA and MBA from Harvard College.

 

Angela Yochem is an executive in a multinational technology company and is a thought leader in architecture practices and large-scale technology management. Angela has held senior leadership roles in Fortune 50 companies where she drove technology transformation based on business objectives. Prior to her executive roles, Angela specialized in design and delivery of large-scale distributed systems and solutions to complex integration and convergence challenges. She has extensive B2B and B2C commerce implementation experience, with a foundation in systems design and network design and management of multicampus networks. Angela is the author of J2EE and WebLogic Server, 2nd Edition and is an IASA Fellow and an US Patent holder. Angela serves on executive boards and is a regular speaker at events and forums in the United States and abroad.

 

Les Phillips is a VP of enterprise architecture at SunTrust Banks Inc. Leveraging more than 15 years of industry experience, Les lays out the strategic and business foundation for many enterprise areas. Throughout his career Les has applied smart strategies and inventive ideas on pressing business objectives in fields such as supply chain, telecommunications, banking, retail, and education. He’s passionate when discussing his business transformation experience. Focusing on enterprise concerns and event-driven analytics, Les inspires and effectively helps businesses transform their DNA to achieve their market potential and performance goals. A longtime cyberspace veteran, Les specializes in system integration. He has enabled numerous Fortune 500 businesses to expand their awareness by integrating their systems with the outside world. On these engagements, he led many initiatives to maximize current IT investments by exposing their inherent strengths as business services. Les combines his skills with a twist of logic and a dash of creativity to form mouthwatering architectural cocktails.

Table of Contents

Foreword     xi

Preface     xii

Introduction      1

Event-Driven Architecture: A Working Definition     1

The “New” Era of Interoperability Dawns     6

The ETA for Your EDA     9

Endnotes     9

 

PART I THE THEORY OF EDA

Chapter 1 EDA: Opportunities and Obstacles     13

The Vortex     13

EDA: A Working Systemic Definition     14

The (Not So Smooth) Path to EDA     24

Defining Interoperability     26

Drivers of Interoperability     28

Application Integration: A Means to Interoperate     29

Interoperation and Business Process Management     31

Is There a Diet for All This Spaghetti?      35

How Architecture Promotes Integration     37

Management and Governance     39

Chapter Summary     43

Endnote     45

 

Chapter 2 SOA: The Building Blocks of EDA     47

Making You an Offer You Can’t Understand     47

SOA: The Big Picture     48

Defining Service     49

Service-Based Integration     50

Web Services     51

What Is SOA?      59

Loose Coupling in the SOA     60

Chapter Summary     61

 

Chapter 3 Characteristics of EDA     63

Firing Up the Corporate Neurons     63

Revisiting the Enterprise Nervous System     63

The Ideal EDA     78

BAM--A Related Concept     86

Chapter Summary     87

Endnotes     89

 

Chapter 4 The Potential of EDA     91

Introduction     91

EDA’s Potential in Enterprise Computing     91

EDA and Enterprise Agility     100

EDA and Society’s Computing Needs     102

EDA and Compliance     107

Chapter Summary     108

 

Chapter 5 The SOA-EDA Connection     111

Getting Real     111

Event Services     112

The Service Network     114

Implementing the SOA and Service Network     116

How to Design an SOA     122

The Real “Bottom Line”      134

Chapter Summary     137

 

PART II EDA IN PRACTICE

Chapter 6 Thinking EDA     141

A Novel Mind-Set     141

Reducing Central Control     142

Thinking about EDA Implementation     148

When EDA Is Not the Answer     151

An EDA Product Examined     153

Chapter Summary     157

Endnotes     158

 

Chapter 7 Case Study: Airline Flight Control     159

Learning Objectives     160

Business Context: Airline Crunch Time     160

The Ideal Airline Flight Control EDA     167

What FEDA Might Look Like in Real Life     176

Program Success     197

Chapter Summary     206

Endnotes     207

 

Chapter 8 Case Study: Anti-Money Laundering     209

Learning Objectives     210

Cracking a Trillion Dollar, Global Crime Wave     210

IT Aspects of Anti-Money Laundering     216

EDA as a Weapon in the War on Money Laundering     221

Chapter Summary     259

Endnotes     260

 

Chapter 9 Case Study: Event-Driven Productivity Infrastructure     261

Learning Objectives     262

The Often Inadequate Human Link in the EDA     262

Overview of Productivity Infrastructure     264

The Potential Benefits of EDA-PI Integration     267

ProdCo, an EDA-PI Integration Scenario     273

Chapter Summary     293

Endnotes     294

Preface

Preface About This Book

As professionals in the enterprise architecture field, we have observed the recent and spectacular rise of the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with excitement tempered by concern. The new standards-based architectural paradigm promises great advances in interoperability amongst previously incompatible software applications. In turn, it has the potential to deliver gains in agility and IT cost control. Perhaps most exciting, though, is the potential for SOA to make possible the realization of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), an approach to enterprise architecture that yields a high level of agility by increasing systems’ awareness and intelligent responses to relevant events.

At the same time, it became clear to us that the steps required to design and deploy an EDA, or an SOA, its master set of architectural characteristics, were far from obvious. Even going beyond the fact that the technology and standards are immature and thus challenging, the practice of , uniting software with an overarching standards-based approach that extends outside the enterprise is a new field, lacking in many of the guiding principles of infrastructure, governance, and best practices that hold together most traditional forms of architecture and development.

For better or worse, some software vendors are now bringing what they call EDA suites to market. However, the commercial offerings in EDA tend to be quite narrowly defined and vendor-centric. As such, they are inadequate on their own to offer much in the way of instruction on the overall best practices required for EDA.

We perceive a need amongst architects for a book that combines both the theory of EDA - the grand vision that lead to its formation and the essential nature of the paradigm – with a practical look at building an EDA over an SOA implementation in the real world. This book is neither all theory nor all practice. It is a blend, with the idea that true success with EDA depends on a good understanding of both aspects of the paradigm.

To understand how this book is set up and what it contains, we thought it would make sense first to take a quick look at the definition, history, and context of EDA and SOA. These two related architectural styles are not as new as they seem, though recent developments in standards have lead to breakthroughs in their potential realization.

Inside This Book: The Path to EDA

Even for a lot of experienced architects and developers, the implicit connection between EDA and SOA has not been intuitively obvious. A lot of IT pros react to SOA with a sentiment akin to, “That’s really cool. Now what?” These questions are completely legitimate. Imagine someone handing you a violin and declaring, “Oh, good, now I get to hear Mozart.” That person is making several assumptions, including that you know what the violin is, how to play it and how to play Mozart in particular. In many IT situations, it is not always evident how loose coupling and a service-orientation will take you to an EDA. If your boss drops a VisualStudio.Net pack on your desk and says, “Now you will deliver an EDA,” you may not necessarily know how to get from here to there. That is purpose of this book.

Much of this book is dedicated to helping you understand where the rubber meets the road in turning the vision of EDA into a reality. In so doing, we will delve into detail on the subject of SOA, providing the essential building blocks of the most versatile and effective EDAs. We will address one of the great unanswered questions posed in the wake of SOA’s high profile arrival on the IT scene: How do you actually get to the achievement of business goals that EDA enables using the actual technologies that comprise SOA? The leap from Web services and SOA to the fulfillment of EDA, and its attendant agility and IT cost savings requires some serious discipline.

Part I – The Theory of EDA

This book consists of two parts. Part I, The Theory of EDA, covers the theoretical aspects of EDA. The path to EDA, which we will guide you through in this book, starts with an understanding of what EDA is. Part I begins with a thorough theoretical definition of EDA. We will cover the core components of EDA, such as event consumers and producers, message backbones, web service transport and so on. We will also describe the basic patterns of EDA, including Simple Event Processing, Event Stream Processing, and Complex Event Processing.

From this definition, we will then explore the current context of EDA, which is the jungle of interoperability challenges that we all face in large enterprises. Having thus set up the situation that we face: we want EDA (or at least, we should consider it), we see how difficult it can be to attain. Enter SOA, and its open interoperability, which paves the way for the realization of EDA.

In addition to defining EDA, we will explore the SOA-EDA connection in depth. In our view, any serious attempt to develop an EDA today will rely on the use of SOA technology as they are emerging in the marketplace. The EDA of tomorrow will run on Web Services and Enterprise Service Buses. The EDA components – the event producers, consumers, and processors, will all be Web Services. We will flesh out this vision of EDA.

The conclusion of Part I will consist of examples of EDAs and how they might function. We will explore examples of how businesses and other organizations might ideally use EDA to further their objectives. This set of examples will provide a transition to Part II of the book, which moves you into the reality of EDA and how it might be approached in an actual enterprise setting.

Part II – EDA in Practice

Part II begins with Chapter 6, Thinking EDA. This chapter explores ways to identify the ideal use of an EDA, or a partial EDA in realizing a set of business objectives. Chapters 7 and beyond present a set of case studies of EDA. Some of these case studies are based on real companies. Others are partially hypothetical, but based on real life experiences we have had in the world of enterprise architecture.

In each case study, we will describe the organizations involved as well as the technological and business challenges and objectives that they have. We will look at the ways in which the business and technological situation would either benefit from an EDA approach. We will look at how the practical issues that arise in its design and implementation. Our goal is to include, where relevant, some organization and non IT issues, such as project management and communication. Of course, we will get into depth on the technologies required to birth the EDA.

Throughout the case studies, we will look at a number of related topics in the field of enterprise architecture that have relevance for learning about EDA. These include SOA infrastructure, governance, and security. Wherever possible, we will try to point out business issues that are relevant, but perhaps not apparent to the technology reader, as well as technology issues that may not be noticed by the business reader.

One of our other goals is to instill in you a good sense of when to use an EDA approach and when not to, for the paradigm is not a panacea for all IT and business problems. This issue reminds of the story of a man who once approached a famous surgeon and said, “You make more money in a week than I make in a year. I don’t think it’s fair. Is what you do so special?” The surgeon replied, “Surgery itself isn’t that complicated. I could probably teach you to do it in a few weeks. What takes the training and skill is knowing when not to operate, and what to do when something goes wrong. Learning those two things can take years.”

So it is with EDA. Developing a Web service is not hard for an experienced developer. Knowing how to use the functions of an SOA to create an EDA, though, is another matter. And, like the surgeon, you would be well served by understanding when to use and not use the EDA approach. If you take away nothing else from this book, consider that there are many cases where an EDA is not the optimal solution to a business issue.

Who Should Read This Book, and How They Should Read it

If you’re holding this book in your hand, you are probably involved with information technology. If you are not in technology, we really admire your desire to be a broadly informed citizen. We have written this book in fairly deep, but not excessively detailed technical language.

This is not a book that is awash in code or extensive jargon. We have made the choice to skip the deep, deep techie language because of the likely blend of readers that we expect to find the subject of EDA of interest to their work. EDA itself is an area that is inherently interdisciplinary. EDA naturally throws together developers, line of business people, IT managers, security specialists, architects, and network operations people. There is probably a whole EDA book for each of those disciplines. Luckily for us, someone else will write them. We wanted to present the topic in a unified approach that a multiplicity of readers could absorb.

Our other guess is that you probably work at a large organization, or with an entity that interfaces with large organizations. Whether you work at a corporation, public sector organization, or educational institution, the issues for EDA are the same. We come from the corporate world, so we have a tendency to talk about “business value” a lot. If you can’t relate to this, we are sorry, but for stylistic reasons we need to use just one measure of efficiency, and in our world, that measure is usually dollars. So, when we talk about “business value”, we mean the economy of effort required to produce a result. It’s a concept that can translate into any organizational agenda.

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