Managing Configuration Complexity during Deployment and Maintenance of SOA Solutions

Successful deployment and maintenance of enterprise SOA solutions involves configuring and managing several middleware software stacks. These middleware stacks have several hundreds to thousands of configuration attributes to be configured and managed. Ineffective Management of configuration information increases the cost, labor and time of troubleshooting configuration problems. The reason for it are two-folds: (a) configuration dependencies cut across different software stacks and there is no formal method to capture and consolidate them, and (b) incorrect configuration of attributes results in runtime exceptions. Correlating exceptions obtained during runtime to deployment/maintenance time configuration values is difficult as the context of the error is lost and is often not traceable. Current approaches to managing and troubleshooting problems associated with configuration information involve extensive human labor which comes at a premium. In this paper, we introduce Configuration Map (CM), which is an ordered set of configuration attributes for a deployable middleware component. Such a map when associated with exceptions helps reduce the cost of resolving configuration problems. We present several use cases and show from real life deployment scenarios that CM significantly reduces the cost of labor and time.