Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

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...

While IT analysts and pundits are busy declaring SOA is dead, SOA has failed, and the downturn killed SOA, the hype of 2009 is Cloud Computing and the resurgence of Software as a Service (SaaS). ( Microsoft Azure being a prime example.) In my discussions with my corporate clients, as well as from my own extensive corporate history, I'm finding that allowing key corporate data and processes to leave the walls of the company controlled data center is the main mental barrier to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Even though companies are outsourcing business processes and the associated data that goes with them - as well as outsourcing some applications to hosting providers - the thought of deploying their applications to an amorphous cloud and depending upon the vendor to just "support and provision it appropriately" is a mental leap they're not yet prepared to make. Similarly, relying upon services that a vendor will just "support and provision appropriately" is a...

The article of the year is from Ann Thomas Manes at The Burton Group: SOA is Dead, Long Live Services. Nothing like a provacative title to get your attention. SOA from a vendor perspective is whatever tool they are selling in the space: ESB, Design Time Governance, Runtime Governance, Policy Management, Registry & Repository, etc. What they always sell is the tool, never the process. Since the A in SOA is Architecture, and the true value of SOA is SOA for the Enterprise (as opposed to SOA for Integration ), it takes implementation of a SOA architecture pattern to get the hyped SOA benefits. But as noted above, this is not what vendors are selling. As most organizations focus on SOA for Integration and layer on a few tools rather than applying architecture and an organizational change process (which, face it, is hard), only incremental benefits will be gained. This is not a surprise, IT managers are rarely rewarded for shaking things up and taking risks. Much of SOA is about c...

A major utility customer called and requested to meet with a SOA expert. I was called to meet with the customer and determine what they needed. The customer's fancy new headquarters is an architectural masterpiece. Pleasant and interestng to look at on the outside, neat "smart building" features on the inside. On entering the meeting, the customer team got right to the point, "We aren't doing SOA and want to know if we should be." They explained they had a high reliability requirement and an existing high reliability environment. Taking it a step further, they have an OLD high reliabilty environment... majority IBM mainframe, MQ for messaging between apps when they're not on the same environment. I explained the advantages and goals of SOA, such as: - Ease Integration - Flexibility - Enable Real Time Processing - Enable Real Time Data Accessibility - Reuse --- Single Service Instance --- Single Installation --- Single “System” for Single Business Functio...