SOA presents a new set of challenges for organizations deploying composite applications into the production environment. That's because SOA systems often include services that are shared across different applications and ones that are outside the direct control of a project or department. A change to any service can break multiple applications consuming that service in unexpected ways.

Individual component testing and composite application testing in isolated QA environments are not sufficient for verifying changes. Due to the distributed nature of SOA, it is seldom possible for QA staff to precisely replicate the production environment in QA test beds. Some services—such as those offered by other groups or departments within an enterprise or those provided by external business partners—may not be available for testing. Sanitized test data may not present all of the challenges of data exchanged in production.

For these reasons, deploying new services or new versions of existing services into production may be a process fraught with uncertainty. To alleviate the uncertainty, operations teams must verify SOA applications independently before rolling them out into live environments.

SOA deployment procedures can be even more challenging when an application depends on services that are hosted by a different group or an external enterprise. Remote services can change without warning and at damaging times—such as when the applications are saddled with peak customer traffic. Therefore, production SOA applications must be frequently verified to ensure that they're functioning as required.

To solve these issues, AmberPoint has leveraged its industry-leading runtime governance technology to introduce the industry's first SOA validation system.

"Pre-flight Check" for SOA Applications

Ever notice that a pre-flight check is performed rigorously by an airplane's pilot after the plane has already been checked by service crews? Why would the pilot undertake a seemingly redundant procedure? The answer is simple—the pilot's checklist is different from the one used by the service crew. It’s designed to catch problems that may not have surfaced during normal maintenance, while also providing the redundancy that is the basis for flight safety.

AmberPoint offers a similar mechanism for SOA services. AmberPoint's validation system helps operations teams verify the integrity of composite SOA applications as they are migrated piecemeal into production. Using AmberPoint, deployment teams can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. Additionally, they can perform "what-if" runs to see the potential impact of management policies (especially security) as they change within the runtime environment.

Service Simulation

To help complete the validation test bed, AmberPoint provides accurate simulation of services, down to actual production traffic and realistic performance characteristics. Service simulation proves extremely useful where a business application interacts with a large number of external services, all of which must be included for a full transaction to be executed. These include business partners’ services as well software provided as a service over the Internet.

Augments Existing SOA Testing

AmberPoint integrates and extends tools from leading SOA testing vendors, providing comprehensive end-to-end validation and testing to support the most complex SOA environments. AmberPoint helps to ensure that operations teams don't fly blindly into production SOA. 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.