 Key Decisions for a large SOA Implementation
Client Overview
A large national mortgage lender that originates and services home mortgage loans through 280 branch offices and over 14,000 affiliates across the United States.
Business Needs and Project Objectives
Our client had plans to rebuild their loan origination system onto an SOA platform. There would be over 20 participating systems with over 100 distinct services integrated onto this platform for loan origination processing. With the housing boom, the client's business and transactional volumes were extremely high. The existing technology platform was inadequate to handle their expanding requirements. Revenue was limited by their ability to originate and service loans.
The heart of this implementation was the Enterprise Service Bus or the ESB. On an SOA architecture, complex business processes are "orchestrated" among participating systems via messaging. All key messaging and integration between these systems occur on the ESB. Like a highway system that connects different parts of a country, the chosen ESB platform must be able to handle existing and anticipated volume.
For such a critical decision and so much at stake, our client was looking to make the most informed decision possible. AAXIS was chartered by the client to recommend an ESB solution and provide architectural direction.
Goals:
- Coordinate the vendor selection process for choosing the ESB platform
- Scope business and technical requirements including vendor acceptance criteria
- Perform rigorous testing of the candidate ESB platforms using AAXIS ARM
- Provide architectural recommendations for the ESB and SOA
Challenges / Requirements:
This initiative would provide answers to one of the biggest architectural decisions for the project. The scope of the Loan Origination System itself was very large. There were very aggressive timelines and multiple sub-projects waiting upon this decision.
Since this decision had a very high impact, the client wanted to do all that was possible to ensure the right decision. The AAXIS approach would include a much deeper analysis from different aspects including using AAXIS ARM methodology for the non-functional testing.
Key Challenges:
- Very crucial decision for the client
- Very large project with multiple initiatives running in parallel; Over 20 systems to be integrated onto the SOA architecture; All initiatives dependent on technology selection
- Testing strategy needed to be very thorough and rigorous
- Client was very concerned with performance and scalability; Simulating realistic transactional volumes of 385,000 messages per hour and ensuring messages were not lost would require development of test harnesses and a good testing strategy
- Needed to narrow down 12 ESB vendor candidates
Role of AAXIS:
AAXIS was chartered to recommend an ESB solution for the client’s SOA initiative.AAXIS engaged with the client at different levels to achieve this goal:
Analysis:
- Worked with project teams to estimate transactional volumes
- Coordinated vendor selection process and acceptance criteria
- Published non-functional testing results to provide performance and threshold guidelines
Technical:
- Non-functional testing of ESB
- Developed test-harnesses to simulate production loads
Implementation/Architecture:
- Prepared hardware and software recommendations
- Prepared recommended deployment architecture
- Provided architectural guidance throughout implementation
Beyond the initial ESB platform selection, AAXIS also played the following roles:
- Architectural oversight
- Development
- Non-functional performance testing
Results
Project was very successful and SOA platform went to production. ESB vendor candidates were narrowed down to three based on acceptance criteria. Rigorous non-functional testing was conducted on the ESB. The ESB was tested for its thresholds and performance characteristics. This information had significant value for designing the deployment model and assisting in architectural decisions.
AAXIS was involved on this project from analysis throughout implementation.
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