Teams embrace all-inclusive SOA

It take all kinds to build a service-oriented architecture - all kinds of IT people, that is.

Application developers, data architects, security specialists and IT directors all have a stake in the design of application services and the enterprise framework across which they run. Network executives are no exception.

"SOA deployments are likely to be more distributed in nature than a typical, monolithic application, and with that comes potentially higher levels of network traffic, plus a greater dependency of the core application on the networking infrastructure," says Brent Carlson, vice president and co-founder of LogicLibrary.

"Since an SOA-based application may be touching quite a few different services, each deployed on separate servers and perhaps even in separate physical locations, to support a single business process, the network becomes a bigger piece of the application puzzle," Carlson says.

SOA technology drives a change in the types of network traffic, which can increase bandwidth consumption, says Dan Foody, a CTO at Progress Software. A message transmitted via HTTP and Simple Object Access Protocol - two text-based protocols - can be as much as 10 times larger than the same message transmitted in a binary protocol, he says. Doing network-level compression on WAN links could help with the bandwidth issue.

It's not always so simple, however. SOA is leading companies to do significantly more application-level security, and the effect of that can be overlooked, Foody says. "What this means to the network is that it can't understand any of the data - it can't do anything smart with the data flow," he says. "So things you might traditionally do in the network infrastructure are problems that can no longer be solved the same way. Whether it's compression, load balancing, failover or even intrusion detection, these have to be addressed in different ways."