The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Jeff Browning, Director of Product Management, Integration Tools, F-5 Networks , 12/21/2006
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SOA and Web services place unprecedented demands on networks to be more intelligent and proactive than ever before – in other words, to become a service oriented network (SON). Not long ago, of course, the network filled the role of simply transporting application requests from one endpoint to another. Most network devices were set to automatically direct traffic over various ports from outside the network to internal applications. Load balancers – the network technology most relevant to application architects and developers -- were installed, set up for basic “round robin” load balancing, and never touched again.
As with application technology, network technology has come a long way in terms of intelligence. And as network devices have become more intelligent, they’ve been able to work hand-in-hand with applications by offloading needs such as SSL-acceleration, application persistence, caching, compression, and more. The most advanced of these network products even offer bi-directional proxy capabilities that provide control over application flows and enable the applications and the network to work in concert.
The Traffic Has Changed
Unfortunately, many businesses continue to rely on old devices not optimized to effectively handle XML Web services traffic. With Web services and XML, a tremendous amount of context is embedded within the requests passed via SOAP and HTTP. Accordingly, understanding the traffic and altering traffic flow to better direct requests and responses is critical to successful SOA deployment. Furthermore, in an SOA world where application change happens more rapidly due to faster application development, the burden of configuration change management is increased significantly.
Between increased intelligence and processing power required to understand SOA traffic and the management burden placed on IT to meet dynamic changes, a new breed of product and overall network design is needed to support SOA implementations.
The New Intelligence
There are two critical reasons why old-generation network technology understands little about Web services. First of all, most traditional devices are connection specific; they lack the intelligence to understand the traffic flowing through them, and rarely dig deeply into the application payload where much of the application logic resides within Web services traffic.
Second, the vast majority of network products do not provide a Web services-friendly API. This is necessary to support the constantly changing configuration needs of Web services.
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