Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

As I talk about SOA future vision, the 'ultimate state' or end stage goal, I frequently speak of application assembly. Application assembly is a future state goal where services and components are linked / bound / process workflow managed by specialty environments (perhaps ESB's or more likely BPM suites) into 'virtual' applications. 'Virtual' because the components are being orchestrated into the common larger business processes and are not an actual single block of code working tightly together as a single application - the traditional big-box application. After having this conversation at some clients for about 2 years, many are starting to get it and express some of this future state vision as they work with the business on today's goals. And they are taking practical steps today that let them realize limited parts of the vision and/or take some steps towards the future. But the question is, what technologies are in place that actually are realizi...

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...