Planning for Change
Processes are subject to a near continuous cycle of “analyse and optimize” as well as constantly shifting business priorities and changing regulatory requirements. Planning for change is essential if complex processes are to be efficiently managed across distributed systems.
In many instances changing the interactions between co-operating services introduces incompatibilities between the services and the service consumers. This may be described as “incompatibility risk”. The current methodologies used to contain this risk cannot be regarded as comprehensive - particularly when multiple service versions are deployed across a single infrastructure. The current methodologies are manually intense, often result in compounding system complexity and add to maintenance overhead. The four available options are:
- recompile the existing consumers to provide compatible behaviour
- add additional consumers versions to ensure compatibility across the new and existing processes
- configure the upgraded services with multiple interfaces to accommodate both the new and existing processes
- deploy a message broker to mediate the flows between the existing and new consumers and the new service version
The HELIXsystem Service Versioner has been built to enable complex processes to be seamlessly upgraded with assured consumer-to-service compatibility, without adding to system complexity or having to recompile the existing consumers.
By eliminating incompatibility risk the HELIXsystem Service Versioner takes “planning for change” from being a high friction point, manually intense, resource hungry, intermittent procedure to being a near continuous seamless, automated process