Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Service Boundary Example

After my last post, I thought I'd give an example to clarify the point I was making about service boundary definition. Let's say we've got a couple of legacy custom built CRM applications that we want to leverage in support of a new CRM service. Let's say one application is used for VIP customers, and the other for regular customers.

We have identified that we want a single CRM service to support the Sales department. The development team decides that they will expose Web service endpoints on each of the legacy CRM applications in order to provide integration points for our new CRM service.

We define our CRM service contract based on the business function we want our service to perform. Note that we now have 3 service contracts, but only one service. We have the public CRM service contract, which is what defines our service boundary; and then we have a service contract for each of the legacy CRM applications, which sit behind the service boundary.

These legacy CRM applications are not services in the context of SOA, despite accepting messages over a WS-* stack defined by a WSDL document. They are an implementation detail of our single CRM service, and should not be directly accessed by anything outside the CRM service's boundary.

We now need to implement the the public CRM service operations, leveraging the private operations exposed on the legacy CRM applications. We might employ a tool such as BizTalk for this job.

At a future point in time, if our enterprise decided to replace the legacy CRM applications, we could do so without updating the CRM service contract - assuming of course that the required functionality offered by the CRM service to the enterprise did not change.

3 comments:

flgb said...

Ok, here's a service boundary question:

Let's say as a result of our enterprise architecture planning we've decided that we're going to have a Sales Service (Leads, Opportunities, etc) and a Marketing Service (Campaigns, Promotions, etc).

However let's say we currently have one legacy CRM system that supports the marketing department and the sales department.

Which service boundary will contain that system?

Bill said...

Good question! The answer to that is that different parts of the legacy CRM would sit behind each service boundary.

It doesn't matter so much if we share infrastructure between services; we just must never share data except via explicit message exchanges.

So as long as the data within the legacy CRM system assigned to each service remains isolated behind its respective service boundary, then we're good.

I'll do a follow up post on this because it was such a good question!

Himym Things.Tumblr.Com/ said...

Hi nicce reading your post