Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes
David Linthicum wins the "grumpy architect" award for today.
He posted a rant on Sys-Con Media entitled, "Getting the Links Straight Between Cloud Computing & SOA". It's well-worth the read. In it he references an ancient (Feb 17, 2009) article by Stacey Higginbotham entitled, "HP Confines the Cloud for Enterprises," in which she wrote up HP's strategy announcement on Cloud Computing.
In particular, Dave was ranting about this comment:
But aside from some vague nods to the benefits of accessing information in the clouds (such as with web-based email) most of HP’s detailed talk of clouds in the first webinar was depressingly similar to the idea of service oriented architecture. HP offered clouds as merely a means to deliver IT as a service inside the enterprise.
Well, Duh!
Alright. I admit it. It's all my fault. I proclaimed that SOA is dead, and people who can't be bothered to actually read the blog post (or any of my follow-on blog posts), took it to mean that we shouldn't bother doing service orientation anymore.
I tried to be really explicit in my last blog post, "SOA: It's Dead, Jim," but perhaps people still didn't get it:
"SOA" as a term has lost its luster, but "SOA" as a practice is essential for all organizations going forward.
As I said in the original obituary:
Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapid integration of data and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mashups; and it’s the foundational architecture for SaaS and cloud computing.
The network is a bit overrun with articles talking about the intersection of SOA and Cloud Computing, so it really should be obvious by now: Cloud computing requires SOA.
Note, though, that the exigencies that require we do SOA will do nothing to revive it in the eyes of business people that control its funding. SOA is still dead: business people believe that SOA is expensive, and it doesn't deliver, and they don't want to allocate any more money to it this year. (In case you missed it, this is what I mean when I say, "SOA is dead".)
Our challenge as architects is to figure out how to do SOA without a big pile of money to fund our efforts. Fortunately, SOA doesn't need to cost a lot. It just requires good architectural practices. SOA is about design, not about technology.
Comments