Recommended Reading

I should get to blogging more often, but I don’t. So I’d like this opportunity to comment on two successive posts our friend David Linthicum recently made on the InfoWorld site.

David comments on the growth of SOA in a recent post, "SOA is growing...and nobody is surprised". The title alone was interesting. In addition to its increasing adoption, "SOA" seems to be maturing as an architecture and technology stack. Organizations are a lot more cognizant of their business goals for SOA projects and know the tools they need to be successful with those projects. More importantly, they realize the importance of succeeding with their initial projects. Initial success bootstraps adoption, not to mention funding for more projects and a gold star for the project champion! SOA survives as services, as BPM, as Cloud, as Web 2.0, as APIs and more. Services are services. Use them for integration. Use them for reaching out to your business partners. Use them to quickly roll-out new business applications. Use them to create a more agile business environment. As long as the business needs justify the use of this technology, give it your favorite name, go forth and use it!

A more recent post, "Cloud computing needs governance to be successful", comments on the need to extend governance to Cloud computing. In my opinion, and I hope David would agree, Cloud is just another paradigm that layers on top of service orientation. How do you access the Cloud? Via services. How do you Cloud-enable your system? Via services. How do you leverage Cloud infrastructure? By decomposing your application into services that can independently leverage the Cloud platform to scale and adapt based on demand. Ultimately, we’re looking at a massive shift to distributed application development. As VMWare puts it, virtualization and Cloud are the new mainframe. We think it’s a distributed mainframe. So, Cloud services need governance and the issues are even more acute when you now have the choice of running a service on both an on-premise and off-premise Cloud. Imagine a transaction that kicks off in your private data center, hops onto Amazon’s Cloud, makes a few trips to SalesForce.com, and then bounces back into your enterprise. Consider the security implications for such a transaction. More importantly, how do you follow such a transaction, and ensure that it actually delivered business? Governance matters...

Thank you David – might I propose renaming "Real World SOA" to "Real World Applications"? I really don’t know of applications out there that don’t leverage services in one way, shape or form.