1 post tagged “soa”
This will probably lack logic, reason, and a point since I've spent 16 hours in transit getting back from the RSA Conference and am jet lagged to hell, but none the less here we go.
Since I can't sleep on airplanes I decided to read up on Service Oriented Architectures, I need not have bothered since I've already studied object oriented programming. (Smalltalk-80. So I learned OOP the way Alan Kay wanted it taught.) If you take the concepts of Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism then map them to the design of reusable components aligned against business processes, as you throw in the network as your message passing transport, you're pretty much in business.
What's interesting is from what I read they're all pretty much in agreement that Windows is the wrong foundation on which to base your SOA due to it's incredibly poor resource utilization, being a UNIX guy I tend to agree with anything which points out that Windows is a prolific platform for gaming & malware but near worthless for everything else.
I'll admit that I'm bitter as I've had to work with Win2K3 a lot recently and I've found it to be a pain in the testicles.
Going from one waste of money to another, a significant amount of SOA literature advocates allowing the Mainframe weirdos back into your data center. Of course the literature in question is written by IBM'rs who are looking to ensure that the Mainframe pension plan continues for the another 50 years or until the last Mainframe dude shuffles off the mortal coil. Mainframe operators are the only people I've ever met who'd happily be entombed in their Z-series when they expire.
One of the big things which gets me about SOA is how messy backup & recovery becomes. Security you can do if you design it in from the start & not try and bolt it on afterwards, while backup is one thing lets say you're recovering information to a service on which numerous other services have a dependency, and since it's a SOA there should be a lot of other services which have dependencies, who knows what chaos a restore could cause when the information set you're restoring might touch so many different services or end user mashups?
The vision is great, but the implementation and ongoing management looks as if it could be horrific. It's layer upon layer of complexity which typically does nothing but add fragility.
