Understanding the Need for Application Infrastructure


From a technical perspective, to be competitively prepared to succeed in today's business climate, an organization must

  • Expect and accommodate an evolution in technology employed toward implementing business solutions, and leverage this technology in a way to achieve a business value.

    It is very common for technical people to get excited about new technologies and business people to perceive new technologies as a risky proposition. For an organization to technically evolve , the business people must expect their technology staff to propose technical solutions that venture into adopting new technologies. Also, the technical staff must accept that proposals on new technology must have a business context which clearly defines the underlying value proposition, risks, and overall cost of ownership of the new technology before it can be accommodated in any business solution.

  • Leverage existing investment in technology to provide an enhanced return on investment from new technical ventures .

  • Provide efficient and maintainable mechanisms to allow legacy, custom-built, and commercial systems to coexist with the use of new in-house technology.

  • Train, evolve, and maintain the internal IT skills to spur a consistent and standards-based approach for solving business solutions.

  • Provide a mechanism for customers and suppliers to easily experience a value from their business relationships and interactions.

  • Hide the complexities of the employed technologies so that end users can easily ascertain business value.

Technical agility is the key that opens the door for an organization to realize the preceding success attributes. It also provides a mechanism to inspire and future-proof technical creativity and solutions.

An organization's technical agility is directly dependent on its technology infrastructure. In the past, infrastructure was a term used to identify the nonfunctional aspects of a business solution ”for example, the computing, network, and data storage resources employed toward a business solution. Today, some of the nonfunctional services that were once specific to these types of infrastructures have been embedded as services into vendor-based (off-the-shelf) software solutions. As illustrated in Figure 8.1, these nonfunctional software-based services primarily fall into the following interdependent categories:

Figure 8.1. The interdependencies between the nonfunctional software-based services.

graphics/08fig01.gif

Note

Functional services are the specific business processes a business solution is expected to provide and are represented in software as presentation, business, and integration logic.


  • Scalability ” The capability to maintain a reasonable response time and at the same time allow the business solution to grow (for example, end users, CPU capacity, data storage).

  • Security ” The capability to provide application- or component-level security mechanisms that can easily be leveraged across integrated business solutions to provide a unified security system.

  • Adaptability ” The extensibility of a business solution.

  • Compatibility ” The capability to operate with multiple hardware platforms and other infrastructure solutions.

  • Manageability ” The capability to provide administration, change management control, and root cause diagnostics for business solutions.

  • Availability ” The capability to meet the accessibility requirements set forth by the service-level agreement of a business solution.

  • Reuseability ” The capability for the services to be leveraged across multiple business solutions.

These software solutions are primarily server based, and the nonfunctional services they provide enhance their capabilities to optimally support specific aspects of the overall design of a business solution. The following are some examples:

  • Application servers provide such services as clustering, security, multithreading, concurrency management, session management, and connection pooling to support the execution and management of component-based applications.

  • Relational database servers provide security, transaction integrity, data clustering, and efficient storage mechanisms for the access, storage, and administration of business data.

  • Portal servers provide the framework and services to construct and deploy portal solutions that can be the interface to a collection of content-based systems as well as business applications.

  • Integration servers provide the framework and services to provide intelligent point-to-point business integration capabilities ”for example, publish-and-subscribe workflow messaging schemes ”as well as data transformation and aggregation to and from multiple data sources.

  • Management servers provide specific or end-to-end administration and monitoring of the technology infrastructure (application, computing, network, and data) employed toward a business solution and constitute the management infrastructure within an organization.

As more and more business solutions are being developed within a service-based architecture (J2EE or .NET), these types of software solutions have proven to be a critical foundation in their realization. The term used to identify service-based software solutions that serve as the support foundation of one or more business solutions is application infrastructure .

The acquisition of application infrastructure is always an enterprise-level investment because it is schematically engineered to support multiple instances of a specific aspect of a business solution. For example, an application server supports the presentation and business logic related to multiple business solutions, whereas a database server stores the data-centric logic and data related to multiple business solutions. For application infrastructure to contribute to an organization's technical agility, the return on investment over time needs to be more than just the reuse of its services employed toward multiple business solutions because this approach ultimately only achieves dependency on a specific vendor's software and loyalty from the perspective of the vendor.

In other words, the application infrastructure software itself must have agility built in for it to contribute to technical agility at the organizational level. Also, the application infrastructure must promote and facilitate enterprise (out-of-the-box) thinking for its organization's business solutions, and for this reason, the following attributes need to be addressed:

  • Application infrastructure must not only provide the technology services required to support the construction, deployment, and administration of multiple applications (application portfolio), but also serve as an integration point for legacy, technology variant, and proprietary information systems.

  • The application infrastructure software must be implemented using industry-accepted and standards-based approaches. So, as new technologies are founded ”for example, Web services ”and standards evolve to provide a means to embrace that technology or at least integrate with it, there is confidence the application infrastructure solution will have technology longevity and agility built in.

  • Because a business solution should be resolved in a technology-independent manner (business-driven), the application infrastructure solution cannot afford to be confined to a single hardware platform and must provide mechanisms for easy interoperation with many technologies, network systems, and devices.

  • Vendors of commercial component-based business solutions must favor the application infrastructure solution as a dominant and certified foundation for their products. This is a good litmus test that your application infrastructure choices are industry aligned and serviceware will always be available if the need arises.

  • Because an organization's application infrastructure can be composed of multiple application infrastructure solutions, it is imperative that these solutions are completely interoperable and their impact on each other is completely validated before their introduction.

Keep these application infrastructure attributes in the back of your mind as your learning of application infrastructure evolves throughout this chapter .



BEA WebLogic Platform 7
BEA WebLogic Platform 7
ISBN: 0789727129
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 360

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