Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and autonomic computing are among the hottest topics in IT today. SOA simplifies integration and facilitates the componentization of enterprise-wide systems, thereby enabling optimal business agility. Autonomic computing allows these systems to operate without human intervention - through self-configuring, self-healing, and self-managing capabilities. By combining autonomic computing with SOA, enterprises can now achieve a new IT utopia, named "Autonomic SOA." However, this new level of autonomic computing goes beyond just reacting to traditional IT issues, such as increasing the speed to diagnose, repair, and prevent future issues. Autonomic SOA is also able to respond dynamically as changes occur within business conditions and processes, thereby empowering enterprises everywhere to achieve flawless execution on a daily basis.

A Healing Touch: Autonomic Computing
A useful analogy for understanding autonomic computing is the human nervous system. Autonomic controls in the human nervous system send indirect messages that regulate temperature, breathing, heart rate, and digestion without conscious thought. If your core body temperature rises too high your autonomic systems cause your sweat glands to secrete and cool you down automatically and involuntarily. By analogy, an autonomic computing system keeps core IT systems functioning at a basic level. If the CPU of a particular system appears to be overburdened, or another runs out of disk space, the autonomic system adapts to the situation by adjusting and reallocating available resources to maintain the system's equilibrium.

An autonomic IT infrastructure is made up of a network of organized, "smart" computing components that give us what we need, when we need it, without a conscious mental or physical effort. It gives us systems that look alive and think they are alive. However, in order to fully leverage these interactions, you must have the ability to gain the intelligence behind the autonomic components - you must go beyond the window dressing or the outer layer. Only then will you have a truly fully functional IT system.

So while we can now see how powerful autonomic IT systems are and how much easier they can make the life of the enterprise IT organization, we can't stop there; if we did, business would never progress, never grow, and never achieve optimal execution. Why not strive for full business consciousness? Where did the business failure occur and why? How can I improve my business execution? Is the answer in the IT infrastructure or is it in the business processes and the humans who interact with them?

Danger Zone: The World of SOA
SOA is the de facto standard for enterprise integration today. Adopting SOA gives businesses many benefits. From an IT perspective these benefits include lowered cost and complexity of integration as well as platform and technology independence. Standardization and reuse enable the business to be more agile in flexibly connecting its IT resource silos into composite applications, which can improve business process efficiency.

However SOA itself presents some significant challenges that need to be addressed by an autonomic approach. SOA is defined by loose coupling where messages and the exact format of those messages between service nodes can be specified at run time. SOA implies extensive distribution and scale because it links systems all across the enterprise and runs processes that reach every department in the organization. Over the years, corporations have developed fiefdoms, islands, stovepipes, or whatever you want to call them; they all represent communication and control challenges. SOA operates in the virtual world and that is a world that is even riskier and more threatening than the physical world. It's a world based on high-performance computing devices so things happen fast (including bad things), and that can leave little time for analysis and thought. All of this can, in the end, have a bad impact on the business users who are supposedly served by these leading-edge systems.

Real-World Business SOA
In SOA, business information flows between service nodes. Because interfaces are published and the flows are XML-based the business information itself is now accessible and actionable. SOA gives us the pathways and connections that move critical business messages between systems and applications that need to do the real work of business processes. Recalling our previous nervous system analogy, this is like the message from our brain telling our arm to move the steering wheel to the right. Hand-eye coordination and feedback pathways allow us to drive a car, and the combination of monitoring (our eyes), full visibility of everything that is happening (all of our other senses), and analysis (understanding and interpretation) makes sure that we stay on the road.

What's Inside: Autonomic SOA Characteristics
SOA is the bridge between IT and business. Transparency applied to SOA means being able to tell the difference between "is alive" in the context of the business and just "looks alive" in the IT context. Furthermore, combining autonomic IT and SOA allows us to determine if it's a business problem or an IT problem that needs to be fixed. Businesses need to bring together SOA for business with an underlying autonomic IT infrastructure. In order to know that from the business effectiveness viewpoint, all is well and executing optimally and to be able to make conscious, effective business decisions - that is, keeping the business in homeostasis - businesses need both. We call this combination of autonomic IT with SOA, autonomic SOA.

An autonomic SOA must have the following core characteristics: flexibility, accessibility, and transparency.

Flexibility - Autonomic systems must be able to sift through data in a platform- and device-agnostic manner. In SOA composite applications, data is in the form of messages that are passing from one service node to another. In those messages resides critical data that is driving the execution of the processes that control the business. If you can understand what is in those messages, then you've unlocked a more in-depth understanding of your business. When you act on that business information, you're empowered to handle risk quickly and proactively. You'll even have the power to aggressively seize business opportunities and in the process achieve optimal business execution.

Accessibility - Quite simply this means that the systems are always on. That has to mean more than that they're just powered up, and more than that electricity is running through the internal transistors and running the operating system. It should mean always on from a full business-execution perspective. Are the correct messages being received and sent? Are they following the correct syntax and semantics? Are they supporting the business process they are supposed to support? Are those business processes themselves always on from end to end, so a business interaction with customers always works as expected to their full satisfaction?

Transparency - Usually this means that the system interacts with users and performs its functions completely while shielding (and not burdening) users from the intricacies of how the system does its job. Of course this should be true regardless of whether you examine this at the IT level or whether you look more at the business level where the composite applications operate. In the realm of SOA, transparency takes on even more significance: transparency is our eyes and ears to what is happening in the business right as it happens, with enough intelligence applied to our observations that we know what to do with what we see.