If you are an architect responsible for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an enterprise, you face many challenges. Whether intended or not, the architecture you create defines the structure of your enterprise at many different levels, from business processes down to data storage. It defines the boundaries between organizational units as well as between business systems. Your architecture must go beyond defining services and provide practical solutions for a host of complex distributed system design problems, from orchestrating business processes to ensuring business continuity. Implementing your architecture will involve many projects over an extended period, and your guidance will be required.
In Succeeding with SOA, I discussed the need for an enterprise to pay close attention to its architecture, the role of its architects, and the importance of setting the right organizational context for their success. In this book, Implementing SOA, I turn to the work of the architects themselves—your work—guiding you through the process of defining a service-oriented architecture at both the project and enterprise levels. Whether you are an architect putting SOA into practice or you are an engineer aspiring to be an architect and wanting to learn more, I wrote this book for you.
Doing SOA well can be very rewarding. Done properly, your enterprise will comprise a robust and flexible collection of reusable business and infrastructure services. The enterprise will be able to efficiently recombine these services to address changing business needs. On the other hand, if you do SOA poorly, your enterprise will be encumbered with a fragile and rigid set of functionality (which I hesitate to call services) that will retard rather than promote enterprise evolution. You don't want to end up there. Implementing SOA will show you the pitfalls as well as the best practices. In short, it will guide you to doing SOA well.
