How the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia implemented SOA

by Lakshika Paiva

Introduction

Royal Automobile Association (RAA) of South Australia recently shared their integration story at WSO2Con Asia 2016.

Established in 1903, RAA serves the motoring related needs from Motoring to Insurance, Security and Travel that uphold the core business of RAA, while endorsing, advocating for safety and informing the general public of issues that affect the motoring population in South Australia. The membership services are central to what RAA does, and they serve over 665,321 South Australian members today.

The challenge

In order to deliver membership services, RAA uses many heterogeneous, internal and external business applications that need to work together. These applications range from Travel and Security apps, HR and Payroll, which are Web based systems, SaaS applications or Data Warehouses. These business applications need to talk to each other and to deliver this capability they are connected using the point-to-point communication method (slide 19). So each time a new application was added, it needed to be integrated with other applications one by one.

The biggest challenge was that this approach wasn’t scalable or economically sustainable. Gina said that it is a nightmare to manage such a system over time. They were in dire need of an integration engine that enabled them to cleanly integrate their heterogeneous business applications.

How did RAA-WSO2 do it?

After defining the exact requirements of integration, Gina conducted a market research on vendors selling integration products and specifically referring to short-listed vendors in the Gartner report. WSO2 was shortlisted in this process and the next step was to develop a Proof-of-Concept (POC).

Initially, WSO2 integration team helped RAA to download and install the required components of WSO2 ESB, as a start to their evaluation. Since our enterprise level open source products can be downloaded for free, it makes evaluation stages cost-effective and easy for our customers. For the POC, RAA identified one key use case and linked the business applications using WSO2 ESB.

The Use Case

Gina explained the implementation of the membership services use case (slide 24), which involves two applications including the membership services application and the print application. Two products, WSO2 ESB and WSO2 Application Server were used in this instance.

• App 1 — Membership services application
• App 2 — Print services application (process documentation of insurance, membership cards etc.)
• WSO2 — Integration platform introduced using WSO2 ESB and WSO2 Application Server

The integration pattern was based on request and reply for which the WSO2 ESB was used and all endpoints were defined under the ESB as well.

Here is the sequence of the message flow (slide 25):

1. A request comes in through the Membership Services system. That request goes through the ESB inbound channel.
2. It goes to the back-end service after transformation.
3. The response is sent back to the ESB.
4. Through the outbound channel it enters Thunderhead application.
5. The response is sent back to ESB.
6. The final processed response is sent through the ESB to the membership services application, which requested for the service.

The Present Day: Moving to Production

The actual production deployment is different to the POC scenario. The following illustration (slide 27) depicts a high level view of the integration platform with three layers.

1. High availability layer to position the load balancers
2. A governance layer to implement the WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg)
3. Foundation layer that includes WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Message Broker (MB) and WSO2 Application Server (AS)

The proposed production (slide 28) includes a cluster setup with a load balancer. The integration platform contains the ESB, MB, G-Reg and AS going into a database of its own. ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’ represent the Production site and the Disaster Recovery site respectively.

Key takeaways:

Gina emphasized on the key takeaways during an integration project.

• SOA is not common knowledge
• Educate and inspire: Get the top management on-board by explaining business benefits, costs and effort
• Patience throughout the endeavour
• Change is always challenging

The componentized architecture of fully open source WSO2 products has the benefit of providing customers with only what they need. Our products are lean, configuration-based and have a low footprint which makes development and deployment easier. Our engagement model is such that it is capable of helping customers from POC stages through to production and post-production. Hope this gave you some useful insights into RAA’s early wins. You can watch the full video of Gina’s talk here.

Originally published at teampmblog.wordpress.com on March 17, 2016.