The SunGard Financial Systems Macro Architecture

Motivation

The SunGard Macro Architecture is SunGard Financial Systems' prescribed platform for solution design, development and deployment. It defines an agile, stable and scalable platform based on a limited set of technologies and a common approach to using these technologies, which will help SunGard to provide solutions for customer business activities using components and systems from SunGard, third-party vendors and customers themselves, with minimum cost, risk and time to market.

Furthermore, the Macro Architecture will help to

• expose business components from newly developed and existing systems as services;
• integrate and orchestrate these services to provide complete solutions;
• "mash up" user interfaces from multiple components to present a single user experience, with a common look and feel leveraging work of the current UI initiative and common UI libraries from the Stardust Application Framework;
• establish a comprehensive identity management infrastructure to provide single sign-on (SSO), access control as well as user provisioning and deprovisioning; and
• offer flexible consumption models for the created solutions based on multi-tenancy and on-demand concepts, while continuing to allow on premise deployments where necessary.
  

Elements

The Macro Architecture defines the following key elements:

• The Architecture Layers (application layers) and the communication protocols to be used between the those.
• Technology standards and components to be used for implementations of the architecture.
• A methodology for how to develop business components and solution using the above.
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Architecture Layers

The Integration Layer

The Integration Layer is used to expose business functions of systems in arbitrary technologies as endpoints for standardized communication protocols.

Events on these endpoints (e.g. incoming messages or files) can be processed (e.g. by filtering or transformation) and routed to other endpoints consuming the result of the processing.
In the Macro Architecture, the use of processing and routing is limited to low-level operations, as any business-relevant operation has to be performed by the Process Layer. Hence, the Process Layer and the Integration Layer together are providing the functionality of an Enterprise Service Bus.

Technologies

The default technology option for the Integration Layer is the use of Apache Camel, combined with additional functionality for the proper integration of Camel with the Macro Architecture. This combination is referred to as the Infinity Service Bus (ISB), and is maintained by Stardust. Stardust also provides technical enabling support for the ISB within SunGard.

Camel provides rule-based message routing, message persistence, and well-defined interfaces. Through URIs, it supports numerous transport and messaging models, including HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS and JBI. It supports a large number of message data formats, using plug-in formatting components.

It should be emphasized that ISB is not intended to provide an Enterprise Service Bus product out-of-the-box but successively and on Segment request provide functionality needed for the Integration Layer.
For scenarios where throughput or latency of the ISB is considered insufficient, low latency technologies (e.g. IBM Websphere MQ Low Latency Messaging) and possibly even hardware appliances may be considered.
If used for event processing, Complex Event Processing (CEP) technologies (e.g. Streambase) may be considered, whenever multiple events in a time window have to be correlated.

Example Uses

A frequently encountered use case is to decouple previously tightly-coupled legacy components and systems participating in an overall business process, allowing them to be replaced individually and transparently to the rest of the process. This lets customers to upgrade and improve infrastructure and processes as necessary, enabling them to avoid a costly and risky "rip and replace" approach.
Use of ISB is also essential to moderate or eliminate complex point-to-point communications in large composite solutions. ISB can also be used for event processing scenarios, to detect and filter business events on endpoints and initiate further processing.

Integration Strategy

With the layers and the componentary of the Macro Architecture, new functionality can be provided on top of existing systems by

• exposing system functionality as services with state-of-the-art protocols (Web Services, REST) via ISB,
• creating new business components using Java or .NET technologies using IAF against the services and
• orchestration of these services with Stardust
• creating user interfaces against these services, the new components or business processes using IAF,

all of this possibly in a hybrid on premise or hosted/Cloud environment as indicated in the diagram below