A methodology for analyzing availability weak points in SOA deployment frameworks

The fundamental characteristics of SOA, loose coupling and on-demand integration, enable organizations to seek more flexibility and responsiveness from their business IT systems. However, this brings challenges to assure QoS, especially availability, which should be considered in an integrated way in an SOA environment. Traditionally, availability is measured for each IT resource, but within SOA environments, rather than being considered individually, availability should be analyzed from an end-to-end view from both business and IT perspectives. In this paper, to address the availability problem of SOA, we propose a methodology that analyzes availability weak points in SOA deployment frameworks, leveraging workflow definitions that specify availability requirements at business level. This methodology includes an effective way to calculate high availability enhancement recommendations for a given SOA deployment topology with near-minimum cost, while meeting the business-level availability requirements. A prototype has been implemented as an extension to IBM's SOA deployment framework. Its efficiency and performance are analyzed here. © 2009 IEEE.