Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

Loriane Lawson over at IT Business Edge has a penchant for touching upon particularly interesting integration problems.  This week she asks … It's interesting: Writing custom code for data integration is nearly universally frowned upon by experts – and yet, I'm seeing a lot of discussion about creating your own metadata solutions for support with integration. My question is: If you're getting away from hand-coding, why would you want to delve into customized metadata solutions? The article focuses upon some of the technical issues and technical approach to such a discussion.  I’d like to focus on the business issues, and how those should be directing the technical approach (but aren’t). Every application involved in integration brings along it’s database (or general data) model and it’s internal data object model.  These models were developed to meet the functional goals of the particular application.  For example, the “customer” representation in t...

Suddenly this year clients are calling me up about SOA Governance, service libraries, service monitoring and control.  First SOA was dead, then SOA governance was dead (even saw an article that SOA governance is more than just dead, it’s a murderer, killing the future by stopping cloud computing).  What’s going on with all my customer calls? Here’s a simple fact about services.  Until a significant percentage of frequently used business processes have been exposed, and exposed at a relatively granular (detailed) level (without being too granular that they require re-composition and orchestration every use), the major SOA ROI (return on investment) doesn’t happen.  Kind of like a real world physical library, it won’t have much traffic until either it has a large collection or a collection of popular material. Most SOA efforts begin Bottom Up, with programmers and projects beginning to use SOA technologies simply because they are available and enable getting...

When Anne Thomas Manes (of the Burton Group) famously declared in January of 2009 that "SOA is dead", everyone rushed around to understand what she meant. Being that a year later she's still giving presentations on SOA Governance and other SOA topics, clearly she didn't mean that SOA was a failed technology. (There are plenty of IT technologies that come along with much hype but never quite translate into practical usage patterns or benefits for Enterprise IT, and therefore fade away as quickly as they arrived.) Today when I'm talking with IT organizations the majority are doing some level of SOA. So clearly SOA has moved along the adoption curve. The innovators struggled with it but got and touted their early advantage. The early adopters picked it up and integrated it into their enterprise IT model. We're clearly past even the early majority and a good way into the late majority. The late majority are organizations that 2 years ago weren't consider...