Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 10. The SOA Supervisor

In This Chapter

• Somebody must be in charge

• All about plumbing

• The SOA supervisor and plumbing

• What the SOA supervisor does

SOA is about end-to-end processing — all the time. Here's what goes on:

Someone (or possibly some software) requests a business service. The service broker goes into action, consulting the registry and then orchestrating the connection of all the necessary components of the service. It binds them all together, probably with the help of an enterprise service bus to manage all the messages and the service runs. Hurrah.

Now that this miracle of modern software architecture is up and running, though, what's keeping track of the whole set of computers and networking resources and software so that it continues to run without any problems?

Why, the SOA supervisor of course! (Not surprising, given the title of this chapter; were you expecting maybe a Ouija board?) It's a big role and, to be honest, the SOA supervisor can't do it on its own. It needs help from a whole set of infrastructure services to keep the situation under control. It needs help from "the plumbing."

The Plumbing

Throughout this book, we refer to the complex technical software that keeps a whole data center and network running as the plumbing. It's our view that you can find out a lot about service oriented architectures without having to know lots of technical details, so why not just think of it as a collection of pipes that run under the floorboards? It might be horrifically ...