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SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) and the mainframe

Article by Jasmine Bennett, mainframe-upgrade.com
Published March 2006, Copyright © 2006 mainframe-upgrade.com

SOA and the mainframe

So, SOA - Service Orientated Architecture - its now a pretty common term bandied around at coffee machines and canteens and IT professionals are realizing that its happening. Probably slowly in a company near you, but happening all the same. The SOA concept has grown out of the MI and Data Warehousing revolutions of the recent past and is the transactional equivalent, i.e. Enterprise wide Browsing is now moving into Edit mode! as companies start to create services and Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) that snap together like lego into Business Processes. It is IT evolution and natural selection will pick off the weak as usual. Enterprises have to do something to get from A. inflexible, complex multiple IT systems with a monolithic mainframe backbone that's even more inflexible, to B. flexible business process across a manageable (perhaps virtual) set of IT systems with the Mainframe opened up (still central) and fully integrated.

Here's why we like SOA - and why you should like the sound of it too:
  1. SOA harnesses and integrates the multiple systems around the Enterprise and gives you a way to create flexible business processes
  2. The IT department of an SOA rich company will be significantly more responsive to business needs and requests.
  3. SOA is like the object orientated revolution shifted up to the Business Process layer and ultimately should reduce Lengthy Project times because of the SOBA lego brick assembly vision.
Sounds too fanciful? heard it all before? Well we have heard a load of this stuff before but the key things to remember here are a) the technology really is starting to get to the place it needs to be to support SOA fully and b) by shifting the reusable building blocks up to the Business Level they are at the place that really counts, makes sense and can make BIG money returns - at last we can put full focus on the Business and build what it needs properly.

Where does the Mainframe fit in all this?
Face it - the mainframe is still the workhorse of big business with up to 75% all Enterprise data sitting on them alongside trillions of lines of COBOL and other legacy code. You are going to have to open up this beast, but as any brain surgeon knows, you really do have to know what you are doing before you start drilling. So what are you trying to do when moving mainframe systems over to SOA ?
The main difficult hurdles to jump are:
  1. Deciding what reusable business services you can safely open up from the mainframe
  2. Getting the right technical architecture to make these services accessible
  3. Don't get carried away with opening up and end up creating a major security risk
Now let's have a closer look at these three challenges:

How should a company begin to define and build the basic atomic business services it needs as its SOA building blocks (SOBAs) from its current monolithic mainframe applications? Well, it will need courage, because this will not work within the current frameworks of IT developments where the Business bung requirements over a huge fence into a place called the IT department who only ever see Users over a crowded room at the Christmas bash (if they are lucky). Its going to need a dedicated SOA team made up of IT experts, Business experts and User experts who have the clear and full backing of senior management (right to the top).

A flexible, intelligent approach, starting small, i.e. looking at a manageable set of key business services with an eye to scaling up later. A User eye view of the organization must be the default perspective of the team - they must set up User analysis projects, where detailed statistics are gathered on day to day User behaviors , to identify the core atomic level Business actions that will in the future form the SOA building blocks. The IT technical experts and the Business experts can then thrash out priorities and get a feel for the relative costs and benefits of opening up different services. If this User down approach is not taken then the SOA project may be doomed because you just cannot tell what the devil all that mainframe and distributed code is really used for until you really get that perspective. For instance IT teams can work for years oblivious to the fact that documents or letters that their systems produce and they maintain are actually binned by the Users and manually typed !! This is true all over the Enterprise world, and is part and parcel of the day to day madness of big Enterprise mainframe development.

What technical architecture options do we have for SOA?
Your team experts has flown up high and taken the User eye view and together identified a subset of application software functions on the mainframe to expose as a services. The next hurdle to jump is to make that service available to the SOBA on the Web tier. This is where you need to have the guys with the detailed knowledge of the mainframe systems to help make the decisions. The kinds of things they will have to look for are where:
  1. mainframe legacy code and data are so unstructured and labyrinthine that its best to black box it and build a screen logic layer over it
  2. The code is reasonably structured and could be bottled nicely into a stored procedures or other transactional calling methods
  3. Ditch the mainframe application and go direct to the mainframe data, and rebuild the logic into the Web Layer
All three of these will need to be considered and most companies will end up with a mixture of approaches.

Just one word of warning, bear in mind that this is an evolving new science and the winds are blowing , currently, right back onto the mainframe. With the big buzz on mainframe virtualization and IBMs promise of Websphere Process Server v6 for z/OS (we already have Websphere Process Server v6 for zLinux) it is worth taking a long hard look at your mainframe and where you want to be with it in say 5 years time. Its our belief here at mainframe-upgrade.com that WPS v6 for z/OS will be a big hit. IBM will see a very profitable pay back for their massive SOA push by giving Enterprises the option to develop their SOA and Business Integration strategies at least in part, on the fastest most secure platform they have, the mainframe.

Why is security even more important with the advent of SOA?
Well, if an organization has got as far as choosing and then opening up services with the appropriate configurations to expose them to the web tier then they have just done something that for decades mainframe professionals have not had to lose to much sleep over. EXPOSE is the right word, the services are out there, published and detailing specific atomic business actions that someone on the dishonest side of the hedge may be very keen to get into.

So - get the best advice on security you can, and one thing they'll say is go for very strong encryption. Remember, the mainframe has not been hit with viruses or the same level of security hacks as the ubiquitous PC and server operating systems and we want to keep it that way. Do not be caught with your pants down.

Executive Summary

SOA is happening and its going to work - big Enterprise has to be in there developing sooner rather than later. Be cautious but determined and your company needs its top people onto it.

SOA and business Integration be difficult - but the technological advances are converging to make life easier - now is the time to take the plunge

Identify the reusable atomic Business services using a User Eyed perspective aided by intelligent business and user analysis. This can then be backed up with specific mainframe application code and data knowledge to help decide which services to expose.

As far as technical architecture goes, be pragmatic, the mainframe legacy code and data may be a mess and different services may need different approaches. Keep one eye on the resurgence of the mainframe, virtialization and websphere process server v6 for z/OS, the imminent IBM ZIIP chip and other developments.

Be secure ! Encrypt strongly. These new exposed services must not get into the wrong hands.

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