SOA's second life as enterprise API and other 2014 predictions

Before he moves onto his next adventure, Dovel/ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg provided his thoughts on the state of the service technology world -- what's ahead, and what just happened.

Last year, Jason predicted vendor cloudwashing would go over the top, and it did. "The fact remains that there is more smoke and mirrors than ever," he says.

He also predicted that "next-generation SOA" --  "lightweight, RESTful, cloud-friendly approaches to SOA" -- would take a firmer hold in the enterprise. This happened, of course, but something else interesting has also occurred: an "API economy" has emerged, and guess what? Yes, enterprise API is just another way of expressing "service oriented architecture." How about that? And as Jason put it: "It doesn’t matter what you call it, what matters is that you’re using the right tool to solve the problems of the business."

On the darker side of things, Jason also predicted a "Cyber-9/11," and to some extent, the National Security Agency revelations have "changed the way the world looks at cybersecurity," he adds.

Jason also issued some predictions for the year ahead:

"OpenStack will implode": Yikes. Unfortunately, the OpenStack IaaS framework may be a victim of its own success, and have gotten too big to be effective, Jason says. He predicts an "innovation paralysis" will set the effort behind.  Lots of lines of code have already been written, but things are moving too fast beyond the early stages when many of OpenStack’s core architectural decisions were made. "It’s just a matter of time before the OpenStack digerati lift their eyes from their keyboards and look around, and see that perhaps it makes sense to build a cloud orchestration platform quite differently than what OpenStack will have become," Jason says.

"Next-generation PaaS will coalesce." As is the case with any new paradigm, many existing development and deployment processes are simply being taken from on-premises and being stuck in the cloud. Jason predicts that as we increase our experience, working in the cloud, we will be seeing new ways to develop and implement solutions and middleware.

"Cyber-9/11": Jason still predicts a devastating and well-orchestrated cyberattack some time in the near future. Best be prepared.