Manyservice oriented architectureimplementations are suffering because of the various
services in use not being properly controlled and
managed.
It is fine when you have five or fewer services - each one can
be essentially hard-wired to the others. At about 10 services,
however, we start to get in to spaghetti mode, with connections all
over the place.
If we try to use an architecture that is fully service oriented
then we bring in the registry - but here again, a calling service
will have its own needs and should have something that can match
needs against supporting services' capabilities.
For example, let's say that we have a calling service that
requires a function that can deal with x transactions per minute.
We could call a known service and hope it can do that. Or we could
ask an intermediary to help identify the best service for this
through the use of contract details.
Here, the providing service will have metadata that says
something along the lines of "providing I am provisioned on a
dual Xeon system with
Linux and
Apache, I can do x transactions per minute". Therefore, we have
dynamic matching of service level agreements, which is all to the
good.
The other consideration is auditing - being able to say what ran
where and when. With governance continuing to be an issue for
companies, auditing is necessary, and governance software from
companies such as
Amberpoint can manage this.
Such software will be seen as a necessity as time goes on.
Thanks to original equipment manufacturer agreements, Amberpoint is
already relatively widespread in the market, but not that many
users know it is there. This means that pulling everything together
under a single over-reaching Amberpoint banner is not that
easy.
Runtime governance of services in an SOA should really be seen
as a necessary starting point, not a retro-fit bolt on. Amberpoint
is way ahead in this game, but I believe that it has struggled to
ensure that it is on shopping lists at the earliest point to make
the biggest impact.
I fear that it will take a few more SOA failures to get through
the press before runtime governance is seen for what it is, but at
least Amberpoint has a proven system ready to meet any need.