Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

While I was working as a senior manager in a Fortune 500 IT department, we went through a recession, and a few years later through the U.S. outsourcing offshoring trend. During the 2001 recession, management reacted with reasonable downturn planning. Business management requested a certain level of cutbacks (say 7%) and IT listed projects that could reasonably be cancelled. Things difficult to cut back (without very serious planning) such as operations - keeping the lights on, normal systems maintenance & support operations, planned regulatory system work, and required upgrades (due to vendors end-of-support-life), these were all off limits. New development and system enhancements were on the line. IT management also reacted in a normal downturn mode. Middle IT management had gotten a bit fat, so they trimmed middle management. For the remainder, they turned to their managers and instructed them to lifeboat. Those employees who weren't considered key - who weren't a subject...

I'll be a featured speaker at: The CTO & IT Architects Forum February 23, 2009 8:30 AM Crowne Plaza Hotel - HaYarkon Tel Aviv, Israel My topic: Is SOA Dead? No SOA ROI? Getting SOA Value instead of SOA Buzz Here's a link to the event flyer (in Hebrew). The presentation will be in English. Hope to see you there.

(Continuing the discussion of Batch Processing and SOA.) This article focuses on USING services (consuming a web service) as part of a batch oriented process. As mentioned in Part 1 , there's a strong tendency to want to consume (web) services as part of a newly developed batch process - usually due to reuse (other reasons discussed in the Part 1). It's pretty natural to say "well, services are reusable, and here we have a process that needs to use them. So, use them." However, there's a natural architecture incompatibility that has to be address. Web services are, by nature, remote. Batch process are oriented around local processing of large quantities of data/transactions, by marshalling large amounts of local resources to maximize the throughout. Here's an example to explain better... In the ancient days of programming, say before 1990 or so, the majority of systems were built using local files. Relational databases didn't exist yet, or were just...

Two weeks ago, Zapthink published a fluff piece Batch Processing with SOA (by Ronald Schmelzer). The article says just two simple things: 1 - You can make batch process controls into callable services. 2 - On-demand batches ("workload automation") are the future of batch processing. The article ignores what are the key topics of a batch SOA conversation, namely: A - Can web services be utlized in the context of a batch process (or workflow automation or whatever you want to call it)? B - Can an ESB provide an enviroment for a batch process, or a significant portion thereof? In other words, is there a convergence between batch processes and SOA integration tools (web services, ESB, or even governance)? Can these respective spaces leverage one another, or are they fundementally incompatible? This issue has come up in the context of two clients within the past 2 weeks. The first question usually asked is WHY? Why would you consider an ESB in the context of batch processing? ...