Business Transformation in Action

There has been considerable hand-wringing over the potential performance impact of SOA, and especially XML, on server environments. In a new think piece posted at Search WebServices, ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg sheds some light on the challenge of high-performance SOA -- and yes, he uses "high performance" and "SOA" in the same sentence.

Granted, SOA is a services abstraction, and "every abstraction comes at a price," Bloomberg observes. "Loose coupling, composability, agility, and the other benefits of SOA all introduce performance overhead." At large sites with a lot of users and traffic, SOA performance is a huge challenge.

Performance planning and enhancement didn't start with SOA, of course, and Bloomberg advises that architects and other SOA developers fully understand traditional capacity planning and performance management tools. "There's no way we'd be able to figure out how to scale Web services if we hadn't already worked out how to scale traditional Web applications," he writes.

Bloomberg recommends addressing potential performance bottlenecks at different levels above and beneath the services abstraction layer. For example, service and infrastructure virtualization "can provide cost-effective approaches to dealing with variable performance issues, essentially by abstracting a specific part of the infrastructure. Virtualization is especially useful for dealing with unexpected spikes in demand, but the complexity of virtualizing heterogeneous resources can often limit such approaches' effectiveness."

The SOA governance framework also can play a key role in SOA performance, Bloomberg adds. "The broadest, most agile approach to SOA performance is to plan for it as part of the governance framework for the SOA implementation. ...craft policies that will maintain the required performance levels while empowering users as much as is practical." This will create predictable limits for overall performance, he adds.