Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

A month ago I wrote how suddenly I’m seeing a surge of interest in SOA Governance.  In an interesting follow up to that article, I found myself sitting in a vendor sales presentation for a full SOA suite of tools to a potential customer.  And this customer asked a very good question… “We haven’t seen a lot of SOA suite sales in our region (and therefore haven’t seen many sales of your product). Why not?” While many of the Fortune 500 and leading edge companies approached SOA with significant investment and (somewhat) serious commitment, others did not. The innovators and early adopters have been “doing SOA” for 6-10 years.  Two things forced them into major vendor ESB products and SOA suites from the start.  First, these were the only tools (operating at an enterprise level) early on the market and they provided EAI and protocol + technology bridging that settled them into a solid enterprise IT niche.  Second, the extending of all the various develo...

Loraine Lawson over at the IT Business Edge Integration blog discusses Microsoft’s entry into the MDM space in her most recent post .  She notes that: “I was also intrigued to learn that the whole thing is API-based. Why does that matter? As Hayler explains, it allows ISVs to build apps on top of MDS. That's a good thing, since the description of MDS sounds pretty bare-bones at this point. The idea seems to be that ISVs will be able to build on better user interfaces and create support for things like version comparison, which, oddly, it does not provide out of the box.” I was surprised at this bit of thinking.  It’s always nice when a vendor product provides ways of extending it’s functionality.  It’s occasionally useful for enterprise IT shops, and often useful for niche vendor’s or ISV’s looking for opportunities to extend a major vendor’s product(s).  But that’s some old school thinking. Since the early days of COM (Microsoft’s Common Object Model),...

“What’s a Service?” my client asked.  Not what’s the technology of a service.  Rather this client is starting a real Service Oriented Architecture project.  Real meaning creating a new ‘application’ by creating a series of services that model granular business functions, and orchestrating those business services into business process workflows (both by BPM and by composite services) – layering on a User Interface and presto, it’s a composed application. But they asked “what’s a service?”  More specifically, what level of business functionality should become a service?  A surprisingly tough question to answer , and when starting with an existing environment the answer usually is “we work with whatever level the existing applications are exposing”.  Not as bad as it sounds as the existing “transactions” usually have developed over time to model that business sweet-spot – preventing the need for the architects to actually address this question. But when...

What should be a service?  Not what API should be exposed or what function of the application should be exposed.  At the higher levels of SOA maturity when we actually begin to architect pieces of business functionality as services, what should a service be?  From the analysis perspective, from the business perspective, and that ultimately becomes the actual IT modules and blocks of code. I had to give a presentation on that exact question.  It was surprisingly challenging, as almost every situation I’ve been in finds either organizations exposing application level functional API’s as services – and sometimes combining/composing those into wider services or enterprise services – or wrapping various blocks of IT functionality to offer more business flexibility (in theory from the IT perspective), as services. Suddenly someone was asking, “ok, assuming we’re going to build a real Service Oriented system from scratch, at what level of granularity do we plan the s...