You are working with an IT department that has embraced Service-Oriented Integration (SOI). The
development team has created a catalog of services that rigidly follow the layering of the SOI
architecture as illustrated by the Logical View. Clients are allowed to call only Business Process
Services, Business Process Services only call Business Services, Business Services only call
Data Services, and so on, with each call going through the Mediation Layer. Unfortunately, the
quality assurance team has discovered during user acceptance testing that the latency of
applications the Business Process Services is unacceptable.
What advice would you give the development team to help reduce the latency without sacrificing
adherence to the SOI architecture?
A.
Change the SOA Services to bypass the Mediation Layer when calling other SOA Services.
The Mediation Layer should be used only between the clients and the SOA Services. The
Mediation Layer should not be used between SOA Services.
B.
The developers are accurately following the SOI architecture. Reducing the latency will require
that some of the SOI architecture concepts be relaxed or violated.
C.
Remove all data transformation from the Mediation Layer because data transformations are too
computationally expensive, where required, change the interface of the SOA Services to use a
single data model so that data transformations are not needed.
D.
Allow clients and SOA Services to use large-granularity operations. Each operation on the
Business Process Service should return an entire data entity or multiple data entities. This reduces
the number of client calls required and, therefore, the overall latency.
Explanation:
Reducing the number of calls could reduce latency.
Note: The Mediation Layer provides loose coupling for the entire architecture. It decouples
the layers of the architecture as well as decoupling external users of the layers from the
specific layers in the architecture.
The primary purpose of this layer in the architecture is to facilitate communication
between layers in the architecture and between this architecture and the systems that
connect to this architecture. This layer is infrastructure in the truest sense and therefore
rarely maps directly to business requirements. However, this layer provides key
capabilities that make the architecture service oriented and is the primary focus for
meeting non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, availability,
maintainability, etc.
Reference: Oracle Reference Architecture, Service-Oriented Integration, Release 3.0