SOA Web Services Maturity Models - web-services

I am quite familiar with development of a SOA Web Service with several languages, but this time I need to develop one in maturity model 3. I have done a long search thorugh Google but I have found this only (summerized):
It is the 3rd step of 5, which either focuses to create in-organization improvements or providing information to external organizations.
Is that really it? My service already targets communication and information sharing with external parties, so is is maturity standard 3b compatible now? If anyone knows anything about SOA maturity levels, it would be veeery helpdul.
Thanks

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SaaS Multitenant Architecture

i just arrived on this architecture, am doing a lot of research and i understood how it work in general but it's all theorical.
I decided to separate each step for the development of this architecture to start implementing so i can understand better these steps.
The first that i wanted to learn was the tenant provisioning, i wanted to apply it on AWS to mirror a production software example.
So, starting on that the common AWS service that i see most people using is AWS Cognito, but it's not clear in my mind the steps of the implementation, like how should i get the tenant data to onboard him in my app? Assuming it's tier based.
Should i have one database to store all tenants data separate from the application database?
I want to use microservices on this one because i think is better to onboard the tenant with different tiers and much more benefits.
Which AWS services should i use to make this process work? I'm not really asking about the implementation itself but a path to understand which services to use and how it connects with each other.
I hope i was clear about my doubts, english is not my mother tongue, sorry about that!
You are thinking in the right direction. However, there are decisions you need to make before diving into any saas service stack. I would start with
Planning my infrastructure - how many tenants/group.
the kind of tenant onboarding system you want
How will tenants onboard their users and manage authorization/authentication
Multitenant architecture, which needs to account for several things at the least like - DB model, shared vs isolated, data privacy, design keeping in mind industry data security standards
what will be your tenant deployment model. Remember one of the disadvantages of multitenancy is also slow time to market.
Your API stack needs to account for which apis needs to be multitenant and which are generic product offerings.
operational tool to monitor app health, client analytics.
how will you meter and bill the client and other non-functional decisions.
AWS offers good documentation to get started here : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-multi-tenant-saas-solution-using-aws-serverless-services/

Systems architecture for small business ISP

I'm the only programmer of a pretty small ISP in a rural area with just around 2000 customers. Now I have finished a couple of semesters in university but I only have a couple of years of experience in the field so I'm uncertain of the architectural decisions that I'm making and was hoping somebody could help me pick the right path.
Most of our internal apps were created 8-10 years ago and are severely outdated and I have been given the job to replace those systems. Most of the basic underlying systems are solid but the apps that we use to manage our customers and connecting those to our internal systems are...lacking to say the least.
Most of these applications were created in PHP back in the day and are using mysql databases. I decided that i was going to create a couple of rest APIs using NodeJS on top of these databases and then create a central app that will take care of connecting all those systems together and making sure they stay up to date with one another.
Now for the question. I've been looking a bit into enterprise architecture and from what I've gathered going with this sort of micro service architecture seems to be a solid plan. However I've also seen a couple articles talking about message buses and my question is if i should instead set up a message bus, for example apache activemq so these services can talk together amongst themselves instead of using a central app that would handle managing all of them.
Are there any specific patterns that i should be reading up on or does what I've come up with look solid enough?
An enterprise service bus will add a lot of complexity to your design, so you need to look at the pro/con to see if it's really necessary. Here is an article you can always upgrade your architecture in the future and migrate the services.
I run some complex services on Apache Tomcat and they work great. Supports a user pool of 70,000. If you build in connection pooling and redundancy you should be fine.

When to expose a Service through an ESB?

The project I'm currently involved requires that business logic must be implemented in Web Service that will be consumed by the Presentation Tier Components (i.e. Web Applications).
The company has an Enterprise Service Bus, and up-to-date almost every Web Service developed is exposed through this bus. I asked some colleagues around about when to expose Service through ESB and I got this answers:
If there's an ESB, expose everything through it: There are several benefits like Load-Balancing and location transparency
If the ESB will only act as a Proxy -i.e no message transformation- just don't use it: You'll overload the ESB and lose performance. You'll better do a point-to-point connection.
You should expose a component through ESB if there's a protocol transformation (like exposing a Stored Procedure as a SOAP Service). If this isn't present you better go Point-to-Point.
So I'm curious if there's a general agreement or best-practice of when to expose a Web Service through it or not. Any reading/reference would be a great help.
From my point of view and after 4 years of experience with SOA technologies, using an ESB will always overload the system since you are adding a new layer and making all your communications go through it. Transformation (either messaging or protocol) and routing aren't to hard to accomplish without an ESB and point to point communication will have a bit higher throughput. Same happens also with business process automation, there are ways to get there without the need of an ESB.
In the other hand, the use of an ESB has several benefits in the scope of a corporation but it must be within a vision and strategy. One of the best examples is a company that has been working for a long time with a wide range of tools, each of them for a specific purpose and that made the company be distributed in teams which work in silos, ones isolated from the others. After a long time that makes interaction between teams complex and slow. A well planned SOA strategy will help to integrate all those tools and start replacing them for more meaningful lightweight items.
So, IMHO, Using an ESB just to solve a couple of "issues" in a single project without a corporate strategy isn't a good idea and, eventually, the word SOA will be banned in your company, when the problem isn't SOA by itself by rather the lack of vision and corporate strategy.
The only rule of thumb that I found regarding the use of ESBs is: The requirement of transformation, routing, business process automation (with or without human interaction), etc. in a single project is not a symptom of going SOA (almost every project has to perform transformations, routing and business process automation), but when those needs are the ones for a whole corporation then it's worth to think about it from a business point of view, never a technical one. If there isn't a business perspective, then SOA will fail.
This is a really wide topic and discussion can last for ages, I will suggest you a couple of links for further reading:
Some SOA Case Studies
Top 10 Reasons why SOA fails

SOA / ESB Dilemma

Sorry for the very involved question, but this is something I've been researching for a while now and it is really frustrating me. I feel like in today's age we have a million and one ways to implement services tat are cross-platform (SOAP) and easy to build (thanks to .NET, java, and other frameworks). However, these technologies have been in the community for 5-10 years, but we are (or at least I am) constantly plagued with the same issues:
Identification (Tracking services) - UDDI; e.g., had to remind a co-worker the 3 times this month where a service is at, despite the fact there is a wiki that discusses the service and a PDF version of the same documentation that lives in a repository where we keep our service docs.
Scalability - Out of the box clustering; As organizations, we spend a lot of money on paying our admins just to watch the utilization of our services and make decisions like, does this service need more RAM, more CPU, more interfaces? How do I load balance this?
Monitoring - error logging, etc; I can't count how many times I have to set up tracing on services in order to see why a bug is happening that only seems to affect one customer, or have to code logic into the service to serialize exceptions, log exceptions to dbs, fail gracefully, etc.
Deployment - easy to deploy; none of this deploying DLLs to 5 load balanced servers
Each one of these problems requires some type of custom solution implemented by the organization. Documentation and UDDIs for #1. Virtualization and load balancing hardware / software for #2. Tracing, writing exceptions to databases / logs, etc for #3. Custom deployment software for #4. I work for a mid-sized organization. I can't even imagine how a company the size of Sun, Google, or Microsoft would tackle these dilemmas.
Maybe my vision is unrealistic, but I dream of having a Framework per se that lives on top of a server cluster that manages all of the above. I was ecstatic to read about Microsoft's AppFabric since it really seems to extend some of the functionality of BizTalk to WCF service implementors: Caching, Hosting, Monitoring, etc. However, from what I've seen, I still don't feel it lives up to my dream for an all-in-one solution that assists the developer and organization in writing services that are scaled across clusters easily, deployed into the cluster easily, and identifiable, possibly even version-able.
So, I don't mean this post to be about my dream. I do actually have a question. For starters, is my dream / want completely unrealistic? Furthermore, what solutions are there available that attempt to solve these problems without confining us to a new and more proprietary way (BizTalk) of developing services? An lastly, in concern to a complete SOA / ESB solution, where do we see the most potential in the market right now or in the future?
I think that you are talking about different kinds of problems here.
1). Developers who don't read documentation. This is an endemic problem, not limited to SOA - just look at some questions on StackOverflow. At least the developer is asking you whether there is a service, rather then just duplicating logic in their own code. I don't see any technical solution to these kinds of problems, you've already provided good registries and documentation, but some developers prefer to talk to people. Maybe, even, this is actually a good thing - human interaction has value above the technical content of the interaction. Or maybe, you're too nice: "No, I won't answer that question, look it up."
2). Scaling. There are technologies addressing this issue. (Disclaimer I work for IBM, who sell some, so I'll reference these - I'm not intending to imply that IBM are the only vendor with solutions in this space.) There are products such as this that can provision a new machine, install a software stack and add it to a cluster to address workload changes. Then at a finer grained level of control in the Java EE world the Application Server can dynamically shape traffic and adjust clusters. See WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
3). Monitoring. I don't "get" what you expect here. In all likelyhood such tricky bugs will require application level trace. For some problems such as finding memory leaks and performance bottlenecks there are very good tools, at least in the Java EE world.
4). I can't speak to the .Net world, but I'd say that Java EE app servers do a reasonable job of deploying the apps across clusters smoothly, and in the cases where we use JNI and need DLLs deploying then we can use products such as the Tivoli stack I mention to manage this.
So, in summary, I do think that vendors are trying to address these issues. And I don't think your life would be simpler without SOA. Imagine instead the same problems applied to myriad separate, independent applications.
Here's my two cents.
I've been a developer at a company that used SOA incorrectly. The worst solution they implemented was field level validation of form elements on a desktop app using SOA. To perform acceptably these require very low latency. A 2-4 second wait to change to a new field gets old fast. The service ran over the network on a biztalk server. Everyone hated it.
If you're going to do this you really need to spend a lot of time dealing with network latency, service failure, timing, and timeout issues.
Don't get carried away and think SOA is the solution to every problem. Used at a high level it's great, used at a low level it makes your applications fragile, slow, and impossible to debug.
If you talk to IBM or one of the big SOA vendors, they got a products that cover each scenario.
Identification (Tracking services) - UDDI; e.g., had to remind a co-worker the 3 times this month where a service is at, despite the fact there is a wiki that discusses the service and a PDF version of the same documentation that lives in a repository where we keep our service docs.
Registry and Repository server. Nice thing is that it does governance (promotion, demotion, versioning, approval) and your ESB typically does a "lookup" for the latest and greatest against the register server.
Scalability - Out of the box clustering; As organizations, we spend a lot of money on paying our admins just to watch the utilization of our services and make decisions like, does this service need more RAM, more CPU, more interfaces? How do I load balance this?
Transaction monitoring software like IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA. Basically, it tracks things from a horizontal point of view and to see if there is a service disruption from a end user/end app point of view.
As far as your clustering.... you have to pick good middleware and architecture. Personally speaking, get stuff that is "cloud" ready. App Servers with NoSQL connected by MOM.
Monitoring - error logging, etc; I can't count how many times I have to set up tracing on services in order to see why a bug is happening that only seems to affect one customer, or have to code logic into the service to serialize exceptions, log exceptions to dbs, fail gracefully, etc.
Enterprise standards for your developers and for your vendors. Integration of all business and system events into a single dashboard. (Most companies spilt them). This is done already at most enterprise shops.
Deployment - easy to deploy; none of this deploying DLLs to 5 load balanced servers
Ahh.. Microsoft IIS Web Deployment Tool 2.0. You can sync 100s of MS servers by just updating the master. It's really easy.

Beginners guide to BPEL [closed]

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What is BPEL? I'm looking for some nice simple examples of BPEL usage. The wikipedia page isn't too enlightening. How about a "Hello world" in BPEL? A BPEL shell? A BPEL IDE?
BPEL is just a way to build centralized control of disparate but interdependent systems from a centralized place.
Users can create rules, workflows and other control structures to make sure everything plays nice.
For example, say you run a school district; in particular, a school districts information infrastructure. Over the years you have accumulated a motley assorted group of hardware and software. For each aspect of your district; grading, attendance, bus routes, nutrition, payroll, etc, etc, you have various distinct software written in different languages by different vendors. Well, you have some overlap in your data and different end users use the different pieces of software and they expect it all to agree with each other - you use your BPEL system to be sure all the data is where it is supposed to be when it is supposed to be there.
You also have some processes that absolutely have to run after the successful completion of another process on a different system. You use BPEL to make sure those are coordinated. BPEL is all about centralized coordination and you probably don't need it unless you are in a large organization and lots of different systems.
This BPEL tutorial covers on how to write a BPEL from scratch.
Writing a simple WS-BPEL process for WSO2 BPS and Apache ODE
This article covers the IDE based BPEL process development. Developing WS-BPEL Processes using WSO2 Carbon Studio
Have a look at the ActiveBPEL IDE. Also you can find a short 101 BPEL guide in Oracle. The demo is about Oracle's BPEL engine, but the source is general enough.
Background
I'll add a little bit to what has been said. BPEL is a procces orchestrator. You can use it to do any kind of serialised of parallel process automation.
For example: A customer buys something on the website of company 'AAA', this instigates a BPEL process in that companies service oriented architecture (SOA). Within this BPEL a series of BPEL components does their work on the payload generated by the consumers purchase. This payload can consist of all kinds of information regarding the buyer and the purchased item, such as <shippingAdress> and <itemId. An invoke BPEL component can be used to send information from the payload to another BPEL process or to another chained company through a webservice call in the composite wherin the BPEL lies. That company can be responsible for the shipping of the purchased item, another company can be responsible for the processing of the money. All of these companies dealings are automated through composite applications containing series of BPEL processes. All are communicating information across the web through (a)synchronous webservice calls.
The BPEL part is where the logic lies, where the true automation/orchestration of function resides.
Getting started
The Oracle documentation websites for soa suite 11g and 12c are quite extensive for those willing to read. If you like to do a tutorial from the basics and up you can use their suggested code to get started. It's a little bit trickier when it comes to applying their documentation to existing BPEL projects, but its still a good source for many basic questions and examples regarding SOA.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E12483_01/integrate.1013/b28981/async.htm
Also, a quick google search will lead you to some expert guides written by bloggers. Some of these are a bit more beginner friendly than the oracle documentation, but mostly lack details pertaining to your own project.
http://javaoraclesoa.blogspot.com/2016/02/asynchronous-interaction-in-oracle-bpel.html
You can also just youtube some videos about BPEL to get the gest of it :).
Good luck and have fun!