Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I had a very interesting meeting with a client a few weeks back. (For those who don't read regularly, I do high level IT consulting.) This client has been doing SOA for a few years. Actually though, they're doing SOI - Service Oriented Integration - not SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. Meaning they're creating and/or exposing lots of services from existing big box applications, and using web service technology to connect apps together. After a couple of years of SOI they have several hundred exposed services and application interconnections. Their architects have spotted that some services have much higher reuse patterns than others and are trying to apply architecture standards such as standard entities and interface patterns to every new service - to up the reuse, decrease the maintenance, and move towards SOA architecture goals and ROI. This is a very natural step along the SOA maturity path. Along comes a change in senior business management. They bring a new...

New generation SOA tools such as ESB’s (Enterprise Service Buses), Governance Tools, and Monitoring & Security tools change the integration approach and model. Instead of point to point connections degenerating into interface spaghetti over time, these tools provide centralized facilities for managing and controlling interfaces and inter-system connectivity. They allow you take control of the integration space, manage & control connections, and provide the potential for connection reuse. They also bridge the technology gaps in many a legacy environment between the interface technologies and methodologies of today and those of the past. Using them allows you to move to Centralized Integration Control and Management. This is extremely valuable to any large IT shop in preventing connectivity chaos and integration spaghetti, as well as significantly simplifying and (critical over time) standardizing interface methodology. This is Service Oriented Integration. It is not, by itsel...

Integration is tough. Traditional IT applications are spending as much as 40 percent of their budget on integration. As the environment complexity increases as well as the number of connections per system, that number may increase to 60 percent. Why? At the basic level every system has it’s internal data model and logical model. Every interface has to bridge and convert those models (for the interfaced elements) across two systems. Then there’s the practical aspects – matching connectivity technologies (or bridging them), matching security patterns, simply determining appropriate error handling, human contacts, etc. SOA has standardized the interface technologies and provided a wealth of tools to bridge the issues where standards don’t match. Most organizations are using these tools today, whether intentionally or because the programmers are using recent development tools that use SOA interface technologies by default (the more likely situation). Interfacing significantly easier natura...