Change management and deployment lifecycle phase

The change and release lifecycle management of services and their service descriptions is the phase during which service metadata is usually placed into WSRR, assessed, administered, and made available to a broader audience.

One useful technique for getting service metadata into WSRR for services deployed into the enterprise is to tap into the deployment processes. Any automated publication mechanism will result in the services having limited visibility, as they have not yet gone through the governance processes to make the service metadata consumable to a broader audience.

WSRR therefore provides the system of record for metadata describing service interaction endpoints. It is populated with metadata as part of SOA solution deployment or through the discovery of existing endpoints; and it is used by SOA run times as well as deployer and administrator roles when detailed information about service endpoints is required to drive operations of the deployed composite applications.

When the development team has finished its work and testing is complete control passes to the change management team.

Deployers further augment the service metadata, providing binding information for service endpoints used in composite applications and managing deployment of the metadata from the development environment to the staging or production instance of WSRR as part of the service deployment process. Governance over the service metadata takes place, as metadata is promoted from test to staging to production environments that might have separate WSRR installations. In the production WSRR, service metadata is made available to a broader audience and shared. It is available to the runtime systems and those user roles that are responsible for the management of the IT systems.

Solution administrators use WSRR content to better understand the solution artifacts they are administering, and in the future might be able to dynamically affect changes in the configuration of deployed applications by updating WSRR content (for example, by replacing documents describing endpoint selection rules or applicable policies).

The key tasks in the change management and deployment lifecycle phase are described in the following subtopics: