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Home > SOA News > Reliable Web services demand managed custom code |
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Oded Noy is Chief Technology Officer for PATH Communications, Inc., a Marina Del Rey, CA-based provider of software products and services that enable companies to manage their customized mission-critical applications. He is the primary architect of PATH's application behavior management (ABM) technology and of P.A.M. (PATH Application Manager), a software-based ABM platform.
Market Analysis
To get the complete picture of a software application's overall behavior in production, one must see into its inner workings. Fortunately, an emerging technology called application behavior management (ABM) provides this internal view in a production environment. ABM ensures the reliability of Web-based applications by collecting specific internal information, analyzing it, and acting on changing conditions as they occur, or even before they occur, thus substantially reducing the frequency and severity of application failures and the related costs. A true ABM solution will produce and expose application behavior data with various degrees of granularity. It will then process this data to determine the acceptability level of application behavior in real time, as well as maintain database statistics for later reporting and analysis. It will also provide intuitive and flexible management capabilities to respond to changes in application behavior, both proactively and reactively. ABM is especially valuable for companies experiencing any of the following:
The aim of distributed computing is to increase our ability to leverage the power of multiple networked computer systems. The promise of distributed system frameworks like Web services is to provide easy access to this power while shielding its users from the underlying complexity. In a distributed system, the execution path of any request made to a software application is inherently complex because of its non-centralized architecture. When breakdowns occur in production, the additional complexity translates into increased costs in time and money associated with accurately determining the exact source of the problem and resolving it. The only way to quickly and decisively pinpoint the cause of the failure is to have access to behavior measurement data with variable granularity from the various execution points within the application. Moreover, with distributed system deployments, it is progressively harder to fully and realistically test custom application code before it goes into production; the complex production environment simply cannot be duplicated in a test lab. The software development lifecycle is therefore extended into early production cycles, and customers often experience performance problems and application defects. The ability to collect and manage application behavior data from within the application during production cycles has become critical. The ABM implementation challenge The effective implementation of ABM requires that a standardized platform for the collection, distribution and management of application behavior data be provided. There is an inherent challenge best described by the Heisenberg Principle ("What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.") that must be overcome:
Distributed systems represent the future of application development, software deployment and mission-critical use. This new and rapidly emerging paradigm puts a great deal of power in the system architect's hands, but it does so with the inherent cost and risk associated with its complexity. It also makes testing and predictive analysis more difficult. For the vision of deploying reliable distributed mission-critical applications to become a reality, we must be able to effectively monitor and manage their behavior in a production-oriented context. In a perfect world, the people who manage, run and develop distributed applications would all be able to access a single intuitive view into their distributed application. This same viewing facility should also be able to provide the data to determine the level of acceptability of the application behavior in a similarly intuitive way for all parties. And once problems are detected, the ABM system should pinpoint the source of the problem accurately and quickly and provide the means for the appropriate specialist to drill down to the level of detail needed to remedy the problem with confidence. Copyright 2003, printed with permission. Oded Noy is Chief Technology Officer for PATH Communications, Inc., a Marina Del Rey, CA-based provider of software products and services that enable companies to manage their customized mission-critical applications. For more information:
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