“Until now, the only way to check a services-based application has been to manually enter test messages and hope that they’ve accounted for all the different uses,” said Paul Butterworth, AmberPoint CTO. “We’ve leveraged the vantage point we gain from our runtime governance technology to solve this problem. The SOA Validation System enables users to automatically verify during QA that the pending changes will not break any of the dependent applications. Customers can mimic the behavior of production and staging systems in order to verify services without actually using them.”
“Testing the interactions of services is a crucial step to updating production SOA systems,” said Theresa Lanowitz, Research Director of Application Development at Gartner. “Yet organizations face a significant challenge in their efforts to replicate the complex interactions of shared services in order to test them completely.”
AmberPoint SOA Validation System
The SOA Validation System brings significant advantages to QA and Operations teams that need to validate service changes in pre-production environments. It recreates the interactions of the production SOA environment by capturing requests and responses from actual usage and replaying this traffic in a staging environment. As changes to services are made, QA and Operations teams can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a service against applications that consume it and applications on which it is dependent. The SOA Validation System also captures valuable performance data, such as the peak usage and real-world distribution of traffic. This enables load testing and capacity planning in production-accurate settings to ensure that Web services perform as expected.
“As they evolve their SOA-based applications, organizations face the issue of ensuring the performance and functionality of these distributed systems,” said Anne Thomas Manes, Vice President and Research Director at Burton Group. “The implications of even minor changes to a shared service are often not fully clear until the system is deployed into production.”
“Using SOA as part of the approach to enterprise integration means architecture can actually enable change,” said Neil Marley, senior enterprise integration architect at Capita IT Services, an FTSE 100 company and one of the United Kingdom’s largest business process outsourcing organizations. “In a dynamic environment, every time a service changes, the clients and applications consuming that service can be impacted. For each change to a shared service, AmberPoint’s SOA Validation System provides the ability to virtually eliminate the risk to the consumer of a new service being moved into production. This is a big step towards increasing the confidence in SOA throughout the IT and business organizations, whilst still maintaining a secure environment.”
Verifies Changes in Governance
Organizations making changes to policies, such as those dealing with service levels, routing or security, need to make sure these policy changes don’t break the SOA system. The SOA Validation System replays messages under the new policies in the validation environment to verify that the services perform and function as expected.
"Until now, the ability to check service functionality in staging has been limited by the difficulty of accurately replicating the interactions of the production SOA system," said Mark Smiley, SOA architect at L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, a leading systems integrator. "By using the actual distribution of messages observed in production, the SOA Validation System provides an easy and realistic way to determine capacity and validate the performance requirements for a service while it’s still in QA. This will significantly reduce the time, effort and risk involved in making changes to production SOA systems."
Complements Existing Testing Solutions
AmberPoint SOA Validation System complements the existing testing solutions a company might use. By supplementing messages and data generated by traditional testing tools with actual messages and data observed in production, AmberPoint enables businesses to validate their services across a broad range of applications and scenarios. A combination of using both solutions minimizes software problems, reduces downtime and ensures production-readiness.
Secures Sensitive Validation Data
In environments that have sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare and government institutions, the collection of production data can raise issues. To protect sensitive information in these settings, the SOA Validation System can mask or encrypt stored messages or individual message elements.
SOA Validation System Capabilities
Customer Benefits
Availability
The SOA Validation System will be available in the fourth quarter of 2005
About AmberPoint
AmberPoint is the industry’s leading provider of SOA visibility, management and security solutions. Customers such as British Telecommunications, H&R Block, Motorola and the U.S. Department of Defense have chosen AmberPoint for its comprehensive capabilities, its non-invasive approach and its native support for Java and .NET. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or info@amberpoint.com.
Press Contacts:
AmberPoint, Inc.
510.433.6553
bdever@amberpoint.com
Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.402.0230
kim@atomicpr.com
