"SOA is Dead" Questions

Anne Thomas Manes from Burton Group recently posted an article related to the Death of SOA. Many customers that I work with who are in the middle of SOA Projects had questions on the article. Anne's presentation on SOA Fatigue at the SOA Symposium was also a prelude to this posting. If one examines the article, you can draw the following points:


- SOA Technologies from various vendors have become obtuse, costly and difficult to implement
- Enterprise SOA success in the marketplace is limited to a small collection of customers and is not widely seen due to the amount of effort to establish the entire Inventory.
- Service-orientation principles are still valid and important in providing value to the customer.
- Services should be the focus not SOA.

If one is attempting to apply SOA to a domain or Enterprise, we should revisit the goals of SOA:

- Intrinsic Interoperability
- Vendor Independence
- Increased Federation
- Business and Technology Domain Alignment
- Increased ROI
- Organization Agility
- Reduced IT Burden

These goals are then supported by the following principles of service-orientation

- Standardized Contract
- Loose Coupling
- Reusability
- Abstraction
- Autonomy
- Statelessness
- Discoverability
- Composability

The application of service-orientation helps guide business analysts and architects towards resuable, agnostic services. By following these principles, we in affect are directly supporting interoperability, vendor independence and federation. Service development also benefits from business and technology domain alignment when analyzing existing processes in an Inventory Analysis.

The success of customers I work with has been on supporting a domain versus the entire Enterprise. Success of the domain efforts in several cases has caused the business side of the organization to consolidate functionality in other divisions to leverage the domain services and their demonstrated benefits.

The key in Anne Thomas Manes blog is that the fundamental piece of SOA, the service, is still important. A service is logic that has applied service orientation to a meaningful extent. This in combination with SOA Design Patterns provides the architect/developer with a solid foundation for realizing the benefits. How you the develop, register, host, monitor the service can be done in a heterogeneous way with a wide range of standards, technologies and patterns.