Digital Earth Weblog

My new role has a strong enterprise architecture flavour, but is limited to one business unit. Last week I attended the ZapThink LZA Bootcamp held in Melbourne. I paid my own way, and it was worth the trip.

I’ve been avoiding Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for years because it was never been clear to me what the term actually meant. To some it was just web services, meaning SOAP. To most vendors it was whatever products they already had in the catalogue. Neither rang true.

I’ve met with sales people on the condition that they don’t mention the SOA acronym. It’s good sport with ESB vendors. You can see them struggle to explain their technology without the crutch of an acronym that is vague enough to mean many things to many people. Given that SOA is architecture, nobody can sell you a product that provides SOA.

My short definitions:

• “SOA” is (enterprise) architecture.
• “Web services” are standards-based integration.
• “SOA infrastructure” is the collection of platforms/tools on which you implement a SOA.

Upper management at my employer have started to talk about taking an SOA approach, although in vague terms. Since taking my new role I have also been doing a lot of reading on SOA, looking for both the good and the bad, to see if it applied to my architectural realm. So I decided to get some vendor neutral training on SOA to see how my perceptions aligned with “best practice”, which is how I ended up on ZapThink LZA course.

What to Expect:

• The course is promoted as a “bootcamp” and covers a lot of ground (scroll down to the Licensed ZapThink Architect Course Agenda). That limits the time that can be spent on each topic.
• The answer to a lot of questions was legitimately “it depends”. Don’t go looking for paint by numbers. You learn a meta-recipe and a bunch of things to consider. You then have to sensibly apply these ideas to your situation. No two SOAs are the same.
• A strong architecture first, technology second approach. The message was “don’t outsource your architecture, and work out your requirements before talking to product vendors.” There are plenty of bright shiny “SOA” tools that can distract you.
• A focus on large organisations, which is fair enough. ZapThink promote an incremental approach, but scaling that approach to the size of the organisation is left to the individual. There was an underlying theme that you would end up with a lot of new infrastructure.
• Some case studies, but not a lot of industry data on how well SOA has met its promises. This didn’t provide a lot of confidence, but as ZapThink say (paraphrasing) “if you cannot make the business case without mentioning SOA then don’t do it”.

BTW, thanks to those organisations who did allow ZapThink to use their case studies and presentations.

I had two gripes:

1. There was no time for objective comparisons with alternative approaches. I wanted more details on what works at different scales, and to understand what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work.
2. The instructor’s understanding of REST was a bit thin. It got mentioned, but was put in the non-enterprise basket without a decent explanation.

Overall perception was that this course provides a solid overview of SOA. I now have a reasonable understanding of why SOA should be considered and what is require to implement it. Now the hard work begins.