Overcoming the Pitfalls of SOA Environments
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) describes the building of applications as software services, in this case, to bridge between older and newer technologies. The end result lets enterprise companies make changes in their networks easier so they can deliver new services faster.
There are many benefits to SOA implementations, which are supported by a wealth of research and information. They include
- Increased business and application flexibility
- Lower business and application development costs
- Reduced application development timeframes
While the deployment of SOA services lets enterprises reuse existing components, preserving capital expenditures and maintaining the sequencing and management of iterative transactions is cumbersome. SOA transactions involve multiple services, different platforms and various vendors, all with different technological environments. Though there are numerous benefits, SOA also presents management, performance and security challenges.
View a white paper describing Radware data center and SOA solutions in a real-world situation.
Simplifying the Management Challenge
While SOA separates a business process into services and transactions, maintaining the intended end-to-end business implementation is unwieldy, but vital, for enterprises to achieve business success and profits.
Radware's application delivery solution eases this by ensuring the completion of service transactions by using health checks. This enables the real-time identification of failures in applications or hardware elements.
- The advanced health monitoring module (coupled with the traffic redirection module) guarantees 100% uptime and full availability of all critical SOA resources.
- The complete solution includes runtime policy enforcement via bandwidth management features inherent in Radware's APSolute OS.
- A device application programming interface (API) is also available to dynamically provision administrative changes within application services deployment in the latest versions of AppDirector and DefensePro.
Tackling the Performance Challenge
While simpler development and faster time-to-market are some benefits of a SOA implementation, those benefits cannot come at the expense of slower server and network response time. For mission-critical applications, enterprises know that slow response times can mean customer and revenue loss due to reduced productivity due to production delays.
While SOA leverages standards to serve a wide breadth of environments, these standards introduce bigger packets and more network traffic. SOA utilization of chatty eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Enterprise Server Base (ESB) servers means potential performance degradation and bottlenecks.
Radware's application delivery solution keeps networks and mission-critical applications available by optimizing computing resources in a number of ways.
- Manages and accelerates network connectivity and speeds up processing time with XML offloading, including schema validation, content modifications, and web services security encryption and signatures
- Provides transaction control processing (TCP) connection consolidation which speeds up CPU intensive tasks like secure socket layer (SSL) processing and handling TCP connections
- Enhances application availability through content and image compression
Radware's application method accelerates distribution to end users and overcomes the potential delays inherent in XML processing and delivery – with no end-user performance degradation.
Solving the Security Challenge
Enterprises with business-critical applications need to protect their assets from application threats and the growing sophistication of application and network attacks. Application-specific security is essential for companies deploying SOA in order to provide XML and web services security.
Radware's patented security solution helps protect your network from security breaches. This advanced technology provides comprehensive protection against security breaches through behavioral IPS and DoS technologies. It also provides
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection for web services
- XML content-based protection
- A combination of static rule-based and dynamic adaptive protection
- Centralized authentication assures only authorized users access the range of SOA services
Radware's solutions optimize availability, increase performance and provide network and application security for SOA environments. The SOA portfolio includes
While SOA is the future of application deployment, know the challenges and look to simplify, optimize and secure your SOA environment.