SOA and Cloud Governance: The 11 Stages of a Service Lifecycle

In the life of every SOA-enabled or cloud service, there are 11 key stages that can help mean the difference between the service getting lost as shelfware in some forgotten directory, versus being the key to greater business agility. In their latest book, SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud, Thomas Erl and his team of co-authors identify and explain the nature and mission of these 11 stages.

The stages of the service lifecycle should be as follows:

1. SOA Adoption Planning: Decisions are made regarding scope of planned service inventory, milestones, timelines, governance systems, and management systems.
2. Service Inventory Analysis: Defining the service inventory to identify service candidates, and ensure there is no overlap with existing services. A service inventory blueprint comes out of this stage.
3. Service-Oriented Analysis (Service Modeling): The first phase in the service delivery cycle; begins with preparatory information-gathering that leads to creation of service candidates.
4. Service-Oriented Design (Service Contract): Produces service contracts in support of the “contract-first” approach to software development. Includes authoring of the service-level agreement.
5. Service Logic Design: The logic that will be responsible for carrying out the tasks in the service contract is expressed.

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