Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I had a chat with a former co-worker at a US Fortune 50 about IT direction, what is the status for the people there now? Leading in to the conversation is the fact they formerly had a US $1 BILLION dollar IT budget, 5,000 US IT workers and another 2,000 positions outsourced (to India). First they cut that budget to $800 million, then cut a straight 25% of the US IT workforce... Friend: I miss you so much in the office... these people will chase their tales for months, its insane. Akiva: So basicaly Company has pulled back from IT being strategic to just another basic function they have to put up with? Friend: Its funny because everyone is frustrated... they all want it done the "right" way... but won't invest the money to do it that way. So we spin round and round trying to find a cheap, but "right" way to do it and it never happens. Today I'm chasing another department to get 'free' services that they don't give away free (without internal c...

(Final Part of the discussion of Batch Processing and SOA.) A web service access pattern is usually designed for "online" or real-time(ish) access. Most web services are designed for single request / single transaction access. A account record is requested, a customer record is updated, a transaction of some sort is executed. Rarely are services designed to handle multiple requests, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 in a single service connection. Further reinforcing the single operation model of most web services is the communication pattern. Most services are firmly operating in a request/reply pattern – regardless of whether the actual transaction operation is a query or update, whether the reply is a simple acknowledgement or a complete data response. Therefore, if a batch of requests comes in, the ESB is intermediating between communication patterns. On one side is a single request, a “file” with many requests (tens to millions). On the other side is a service model that accep...