The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Service-Oriented Architecture: ASP Alliance

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Service-Oriented Architecture

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by Tom Fuller
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Summary

Service orientation tells an incredible story. However, there are a number of issues to consider when designing an enterprise service-oriented architecture today. I fully expect service orientation will continue to be a moving target as the standards, tools, and runtime environments evolve. Service orientation has become the focus of all the primary development platforms. Tools are also being enhanced to provide developers with what they need to overcome many of the obstacles I have described above. The Windows Communication Foundation (formerly, “Indigo”) has put in place many enhancements that will solve the versioning issues and the security issues. Microsoft has used the lessons learned from the industry following the delivery of WSE 2.0 and WSE 3.0 and unified all of the distributed technologies, allowing developers to build “enterprise strength” web services that will help enable the service-oriented enterprise.

Depending on your role in your enterprise, you are impacted by SOA in different ways. Just know that SOA will impact almost everyone responsible for delivering applications. The main advice I can give is to remain knowledgeable of the new standards and enhancements in the service-oriented world, because it is very easy to paint yourself into a corner today with first-generation web services. SOA has the potential to become the best approach for building reusable application building blocks that can stand the test of time. However, with the technologies available today for implementing an enterprise SOA, it is likely that the costs and risks greatly outweigh the potential gains in business logic reusability.

In a future article I will take an in-depth look at the enhancements available in Windows Communication Foundation and how delivering SOA building blocks is easier and more practical with the WinFx release scheduled for 2006.

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User Comments

Title: Project
Name: Dude MaN (for protection)
Date: 2007-10-11 10:07:28 AM
Comment:
hey i am doing a report on the pro and cons on Architecture can u help me.

Title: RE: Great article, but Moore's Law?
Name: Tom Fuller
Date: 2005-09-01 10:00:55 PM
Comment:
Just realized I was cut off when I posted my response. Sorry for taking so long to notice......

I think we'll see in the future that if the services that are intended to stand the test of time are delivered as tightly coupled portions of a business application then those services will in the long run lose any level of autonomy (which would be another one of those tenets).

This has been at the heart of almost every discussion I've had with people about SOA lately and I plan to write another article in the upcoming weeks titled "SOA Design Strategies: Adhering to the 4 Tenets". This will go into detail on these very issues we are discussing.

Thanks again for taking a look at my article and I appreciate your criticism.

Title: RE: Great article, but Moore's Law?
Name: Tom Fuller
Date: 2005-08-30 10:05:45 PM
Comment:
Thank you for the feedback. I have to admit the loose application of Moore's Law in the article has come under some crticism. What I will say is that I did not intend to say poor design was justified through my use of Moore's law in the article. I really wanted to use it more as a high level comparison to show that there is little to no doubt that the capabilities of our hardware and infrastructure will only continue to increase. It is that increase that could neutralize any of these minor performance concerns with SOAP based transports and message serialization. This does not mean that you can completely dismiss performance concerns today but SOA will continue to focus on delivering loosley coupled systems that can last longer than the applications we delivered in the past. That in my mind means we should consider the potential capabilities of the network and the hardware that these systems will depend on.

The rest of your comments seem to focus on the design issues surrounding service orientation and they are certainly valid. It is too often the case that common layered architectures fall into the trap of future proofing everything that is built because of the constant pains associated with versioning. This comes back to an issue of agility in your software delivery process. I know this is easier said than done but, the fact remains, if there was no concern that services could be delivered outside of the natural release schedule of an application then you could avoid this "Field of Dreams" approach you talk about.

You have also made a very powerful statement below and that was, "some sort of agreement on what the service is all about should be reached". This covers two of the critically important tenets of SO. You are talking about boundaries being explicit here and that services exchange contracts and schema not objects and types. I think we'll see in the future that if the services that are intended to stand the test of time are delivered as ti

Title: Great article, but Moore's Law?
Name: TravelMonkey
Date: 2005-08-29 12:25:20 AM
Comment:
Tom,

A great article overall!

However, I was a bit dismayed by the fact that you seem to use Moore's Law (or a variant thereof) as a scapegoat to allow for poor performance today. I may be stretching what you said a bit, but you seem to imply that somewhat adequate performance from SOA is OK today, because Moore's Law will take effect and in 18 months things will be better.

Has Moore's Law been extended to include networks now? I have not done the math, but I would say it's a reach to say that it has held true for our bandwidth.

At any rate, I would advocate creating the best performing design and code you can today, and leave Moore's Law as a nice theory, not an excuse if you can't make good performing code. SOA doesn't NEED to be poorly performing, though I think poorly written web services have doomed it with that stigma at times, to some purists. I think an "outside the firewall" scenario does allow for some "slop" in the code, as one expects slower performance out in the cloud due to network latencies beyond our control. However, for an intranet app, the SOA needs to scream. Internal users are far less forgiving of slow performance.

I also don't think SOA implies poor performance--I think poor design implies poor performance. Spend some of the expense of SOA on ensuring your design meets good performance standards from the beginning; you'll save money in the long run by making apps that perform today.

I think another potential money pit that needs to be examined is to ensure that you don't get bitten by the "Field of Dreams" scenario. You know--"If you build it, they will come." I don't feel that SOA is about that. Make sure service consumers are in place (a real need is identified) and that some form of contract is in place. I'm not necessarily advodating contract-first, but some sort of agreement on what the service is all about should be reached.

Your article is a great overall view of SOA, I think. Well done.

--
TravelMonkey

Title: Nice article
Name: asp.net user
Date: 2005-08-25 2:50:40 PM
Comment:
Hi,
Really nice condeptual article. Can you give real time example where some company is already using SOA.

Thanks

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