Business Rules Forum 2006 : Mission Critical BRMS

Mission Critical BRMS

Daniel [email protected]

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Agenda

About Me Why “Mission Critical”? People and Processes (Governance) Architecture and Deployment

Service Oriented Architecture

Configuration Management Full Lifecycle Support Unit and Regression Testing Security Performance Scalability High Availability Administration Conclusions Q&A


About Me: Daniel Selman

Product Manager, ILOG JRules 4.6 onward, specialized in performance, enterprise

integration and developer requirements

Architect, BEA Systems, WebLogic Portal Rule engine for personalization/security

Data Synchronization for SOA

Product Catalog

Specification Lead, JSR-94

Editor http://javarules.org

Author “Java 3D Programming”


Why “Mission Critical”?

Mission critical applications are: On the critical path for processing everyday business transactions Decisions (execution results) are time critical Failures in mission critical applications incur heavy financial costs, or

erode business reputation.

ILOG examples (some…) Equifax (credit scoring/decision making) eBay (customer satisfaction) Travelocity (travel planning) St. Paul Travelers Insurance (automated underwriting) JP Morgan Chase (CRM, processing 70M accounts) Brokerage (automated trading system) Credit card company (fees calculation, message routing) Car rental company (pricing)


Rules are Critical!


Building Mission Critical Applications!


People and Processes

Application Lifecycle

Requirements

Analysis

Architecture

Development

Testing

Simulation / BI

Administration

Reporting, statistics,

data analysis

Servers, routers,

networks, routing…

Code coverage,Scripting,

Regression Testing

Java, C#,Data

structures,Algorithms,Integration

Standards,Processes,IT portfolio

Requirements elucidation,

Impact assessment,

ModelingStrategy,Competition,

Business impact

BRMS


Architecture and Deployment

The “Architect Knows Best” Principle Don’t impose design decisions on a context you don’t

fully understand. All customers are different.

Examples Calling rule engine from: JSP, Cold Fusion, Message

Oriented Middleware, Batch application, J2EE middleware, ESB, SAP, BPM, SOA, mainframe etc.

Requirements: A range of integration options to cover many

scenarios (WS, stateful, stateless, sync, async, tx…)


Integration into Enterprise Architecture

Best of breed BPM/SOA solutions involves partnership ILOG allows BRMS Decision Services to be easily integrated with the

leading BPM and SOA platforms.


Configuration Management

Of software Automate building testable software from source code

Of systems Setup and tear-down servers as efficiently as possible

Requirements: Integrate rules artifacts into configuration management

repository

Automate extracting rules from rule repository and deploy

Easily replicate configuration data from development servers to

staging or production servers


Full Lifecycle Support

Version 1.0 of app in production Policy Managers editing rules

Version 1.5 of app in development Developers building new integration capabilities

Analysts defining new business object models

Developers/analysts refactoring rules

Requirements Synchronization of rule repositories

Object Model Evolution (BOM, XOM, B2X)


Unit and Regression Testing

Continuous Integration Integrate software modules early, often and

continuously

Includes business rules

Requirements: Automate running tests on code or rules

Unit tests written by developers (code) or policy managers (rules)

Regression tests written by QA (code) or policy managers/QA (rules)


Rule Scenario Manager


Security

Authentication Who are you?

Authorization Are you allowed to do that?

Requirements: BRMS integration with enterprise user registry (LDAP etc)

Fine-grained permissions to protect access to business rules resources (Access Control Language)

| NOUN | VERB | PERMISSION || DECISION TABLE | EDIT | PolicyManagers |

Follow Enterprise “best practices” (SSL, password management etc)


Team Server Security Model


Performance

Is a constraint… Is it “good enough”? Involves difficult trade-offs (time, money, hardware,

maintainability, future-proofing, scalability, testability…)

Recasting a “slow” problem can often provide a “fast” solution

Requirements: Understand your performance profile (bottlenecks) A “fast” rule engine offering a variety of optimizations and

algorithms (e.g RetePlus, Fastpath, Sequential) Multi-threaded (concurrent) performance A “productive” rule management environment for your target

number of rules


Performance of Compliance Rules

0

50

100

150

200

250

5,000rules

10,000rules

15,000rules

20,000rules

Java code Sequential Fastpath

Processing 10,000 objects

Single-threaded

Dell D600 1.7 Ghz

Linux

Sun JDK 5

Sec

on

ds


Scalability

Can you “throw hardware at the problem”? Does doubling system capacity double throughput?

Usually the answer is no, because most real-world performance profiles are not that simple

Requirements: Support for applications virtualized across multiple

servers (clustering)

Clustered hot deployment

BRMS designed for multi-threaded, highly concurrent access


Monitoring Clustered Rule Engines


High Availability

Avoid a single point of failure: Support for clustering and state replication

Deployment of BRE/BRMS to two or more

geographically distributed data centers

Requirements: Server configuration replication

Easy deployment of rules to multiple data centers

Automatic fail-over of execution components

Minimize per-server impact of hot-deployment


Administration

Applications are typically developed in months, but run

for years Administration tools are a great way to increase ROI

Requirements: What rules are deployed?

Monitor execution performance (on each machine)

Support for rolling back deployments

Integration with management consoles (Tivol/OpenView)

Define QoS alerts


Integration with JMX Tools


Conclusions

Mission critical applications bring a tough set of challenges to the table.

Building robust systems requires thinking transversally: across the IT infrastructure, the development process, roles and responsibilities.

The BRMS (both rule authoring and rule execution) must provide the tools, processes and integration capabilities to meet these challenges.

Try not to forget the simple cases!


For additional information

Daniel SelmanProduct Manager, ILOG

e-mail: [email protected]: http://www.ilog.com

http://www.ilog.com/products/jrules/whitepapers/

Whitepaper: Deploying Rule Application with ILOG JRules:


Questions

Business Rules Forum 2006 : Mission Critical BRMS

Documents

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