Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI)

Line-of-business applications have often been designed and built in an isolated and monolithic manner, making it difficult to share information between applications. Over a period of more than four years, Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) has addressed this problem, using web services to integrate line-of-business application services and data. This paper provides an overview of Microsoft IT’s solution, codenamed Alchemy.

Microsoft’s enterprise services needed the support of a true enterprise architecture. Incompatible development standards, lack of change management processes, limited operations management, and insufficient automation were problems in need of an enterprise, production ready solution. Microsoft IT developed the Alchemy infrastructure upon which an enterprise reference service architecture could be constructed. The initial architecture integrated business data from four core Microsoft line-of-business applications. When fully deployed, Alchemy managed Microsoft IT’s fifteen critical line-of-business application services and data.

This poster illustrates a reference architecture for Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) developed by Microsoft IT (MSIT) over the course of several years. The system is grouped into four logical areas: infrastructure, repository, runtime, and analytics. The infrastructure area depicts reuse of existing enterprise infrastructure services such as our portfolio management system and multiple identity providers. The heart of the system is the repository where all information and metadata is created and maintained. From this, the runtime interacts with the repository data and collects data on a per call basis. This data is fed into the analytics side for non-repudiation and data mining needs. Please read the overview papers and other collateral associated with SOI to fully appreciate the complexity of this work.

This poster illustrates a reference architecture for Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) developed by Microsoft IT (MSIT) over the course of several years. The runtime acts as an interceptor for both the consumer and provider to facilitate enterprise grade service interaction. It logically flows according to a pipeline architecture where calls originate from a consumer and go thru a series of checks that provide security, routing, monitoring, and logging dynamically in real-time. The intended use of this work is to illustrate the components required to make services run according the MSIT’s strict governance policies and service level agreement needs. Please read the overview papers and other collateral associated with SOI to fully appreciate the complexity of this work.

So you want to get on the SOA train? Well you are going to need to build an infrastructure, but what does it look like? Well sit back my friend, listen and learn how John Szurek Enterprise Architect for Clear Channel communications has taken this bull by the horns and put together a plan for making the infrastructure real.