What are the challenges faced in SOA adoption?

What are the challenges faced in SOA adoption?

One obvious and common challenge faced is managing services metadata[citation needed]. Service Oriented Architecture SOA-based environments can include many services which exchange messages to perform tasks. Depending on the design, a single application may generate millions of messages. Managing and providing information on how services interact is a complicated task.

Another challenge is providing appropriate levels of security. Security model built into an application may no longer be appropriate when the capabilities of the application are exposed as services that can be used by other applications. That is, application-managed security is not the right model for securing services. A number of new technologies and standards are emerging to provide more appropriate models for security in Service Oriented Architecture SOA. See SOA Security entry for more info.

As Service Oriented Architecture SOA and the WS-* specifications are constantly being expanded, updated and refined, there is a shortage of skilled people to work on SOA based systems, including the integration of services and construction of services infrastructure.

Interoperability is another important aspect in the Service Oriented Architecture SOA implementations. The WS-I organization has developed Basic Profile (BP) and Basic Security Profile (BSP) to enforce compatibility. Testing tools have been designed by WS-I to help assess whether web services are conformant with WS-I profile guidelines. Additionally, another Charter has been established to work on the Reliable Secure Profile.

There is significant vendor hype concerning Service Oriented Architecture SOA that can create expectations that may not be fulfilled. Product stacks are still evolving as early adopters test the development and runtime products with real world problems. SOA does not guarantee reduced IT costs, improved systems agility or faster time to market. Successful SOA implementations may realise some or all of these benefits depending on the quality and relevance of the system architecture and design[15] . See also: WS-MetadataExchange OWL-S Abrobit Roy