Everyone wants SOA, as long as it's not SOA
Summary: 'There are 5,000 people on this planet who understand SOA; while one million people are charged with migrating to cloud.'
Everyone wants SOA, as long as it's not SOA. That's the word from Dave Linthicum, who points out that he's seeing lots of demand for breaking up applications into logical sets of services that can be delivered via the cloud.
In other words, service oriented architecture. Just don't call it that. As Dave explains it:
"The problem is that SOA is a daunting and complex topic. There are only about 5,000 people on this planet (as best I can figure) who understand SOA at a functional level. That compares to about 500,000 to 1 million people (again, as best I can figure) who are charged with migrating core enterprise systems to cloud computing."
James Governor, riffing on Dave's remarks, has another way to describe where SOA has evolved -- application programming interface (API) management. If you want proof, follow the money, he points out: Vendors such as Layer 7 Technologies, WS02, and SOA Software, companies built to tackle SOA governance issues "are now retooling to support Web style APIs, programming models and services."
Both Dave and James are in agreement one thing: the blood, sweat and tears that went into SOA work over the past decade was not for naught, it laid the foundation for the brave new cloud world ahead. "What we learnt in SOA, and built for it, will be relevant in the new world of APIs and post WS-* stack," James says.
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Talkback
Sums it about right
Why not just use something simpler then?
Because it isn't that simple.
Not limited, realistic
An RDBMS does all the things that SOA keeps promising us straight out of the box, service management, service discovery and so on. However you also have standard methods for querying and manipulating data, security, transaction control, concurrency control, parallel processing and much more.
SOA at the end of the day is just a bunch of subroutines that you have to access through code, in much the same way as we did in the old days in COBOL.
Because it should be that simple.
Trying to be too much?
Time to face the truth: It's not a silver bullet, and never will be. Regain the focus, strip away the unnecessary bits, and make it simple.
"There are 5,000 people on this planet who understand SOA"
The rest of us are honest enough to admit that it's not possible to understand something that is fundamentally incoherent.
SOA is great!
I agree that the line between hard-coupled systems, and loosely coupled systems are defined in the IT department roadmap. What its simple in the beginning can translate into a nightmare when you grow. BUT if your plan is to always be small, you can go with simpler hard-coupled apps.
Brave new world?
Oh, come on, there is no "brave new cloud world ahead." There is only a whole new set of problems. Yesterday a lot of people lost their email capability (see "Gmail hit by massive outage: Up to 35 million affected" in ZDnet). Tomorrow it will be another massive hacking into some server or another.
Truth is that the software companies want SOA because then they can charge you for the software every month, forever. Instead of purchasing software and using it as long as you have a computer that can run it (like Window XP still being used), you'll be paying monthly. And once you're locked into using their SOA, you'll find it very, very hard to change. So they can set the price at whatever they want.
This is not a "brave new world" that I want to live in.