Introducing SOA

March 20, 2005

Tim Bray points to John Crupi’s opinion:

What does this really mean? It means that for SOA to be successful, it must be a “top-down” approach. And top-down, means problem to architecture to solution. It does not mean, working from what we have and just wrapping it with new technologies just because we can. This bottom-up approach is quite natural and easy and is the perfect recipe for a SOA failure.

I beg to differ. Obviously, the approach starting out from the top is what everybody wants to do, and what — most of the time, at least — architects and technologists (such as me) agree with easily. And it’s also very obvious that just replacing one protocol (such as IIOP) with another (such as SOAP/HTTP) without changing the communication architecture as well leads to disaster.

Unfortunately, though, when you try to initiate the strategic, high-level, top-down do-it-right approach in any of the large companies I’m familiar with, you’ll run into a wall made of solid brick. No-one will fund a project like that — at least not in Germany, which tends to be extremely conservative in terms of taking IT risks. And to me, that’s a good thing — before I throw an awful lot of money at the consultants, I will want to know what the benefits are, and there’d better be a short-term return on my investment.

From my experience, the best way to approach this is with a mix of high-level vision, introduced top-down, and bottom-up, quick win-scenarios that sort of grow towards each other:

  1. Set up some initial guidance and high-level strategy, spending no more than a week on it.
  2. Solve the next few small integration or B2B connection problems using ‘SOA technology’.
  3. Revise your high-level strategy to reflect what you’ve learned.
  4. Rinse and repeat.

Easy enabling of your existing systems to allow them to play a role in your SOA may be a risk. But ignoring your systems sounds like the single worst strategic mistake you can make.

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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on March 20, 2005 9:03 AM. The previous post in this blog was Encoding. The next post in this blog is Bill Clinton? Me?. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Comments

Stefan, sorry for the trackbacks; My MT keeps getting a 500 read timeout and then retries. I’ve removed the trackback manually from MySQL.

See, we really do need HTTPLR!

Posted by: Bill de hÓra at March 20, 2005 4:46 PM | link

Yep, we do :-)

(And I either need to move to Wordpress or enable dynamic publishing here in my MT installation :-)

Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at March 20, 2005 4:49 PM | link