Note: This is the english version of Jeppe’s qed.dk blog post
There is an interesting change in the approach to SOA and it comes from an unexpected area.
I have worked with SOA (a great acronym which really says nothing as it has been watered out) for over 10 years and through my time I have seen companies build more and more hierarchy (or rather layers) and structure into their SOA landscape as a way to achieve “business agility through business and IT alignment and increased recycling”. If you tend to get a gag reflex by hearing the phrase, I feel you.
The idea and the intention is good, but the execution many places is to the grade F-. Instead of having achieved agility through loosely coupled services, these companies instead end up with hard-coupled services, an expensive and cumbersome organizational Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which is placed centrally to coordinate the hundreds to thousands of services we have built. It is a bit like herding sheep with a chest freezer and a rope tied to each sheep.
Let me make it clear, I don’t believe SOA, nor the ESB, is to be blamed for these failures. In my experience it has been the way they were implemented and deployed that cause the majority of problems.
Herding sheep using a chest freezer and rope
It’s messy and unstable. Not unstable as in the ESB is unstable, but unstable in that we’re desperately trying to create order out of chaos without understanding the mechanisms of action.
Let me make it clear, I don’t believe SOA, nor the ESB, is to be blamed for these failures. In my experience it has been the way SOA were implemented and deployed that has caused the majority of problems.
Read more