Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to Dave Linthicum from the Linthicum Group ("SOA for the real world"). Dave is a prolific columnist, blogger and podcaster on SOA, and is one smart cookie.
What triggered my conversation with Dave were two of his most recent posts on his InfoWorld blog: Scalable SOA Solutions Continue to Emerge and Why SOA Governance Needs to do a Better Job with Data, both of which hit the nail on the head. In the first, Dave is saying something we've been saying at GigaSpaces for a while now, but he puts it really well:
Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches recently employed are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers were happy to get their solutions up-and-running, however in many cases scalability is simply not a consideration within the SOA, nor was load testing, or other performance fundamentals. We are seeing the results of this neglect now that SOA problem domains are exceeding the capacity of their architectures and the technology in many instances.
As I previously wrote in The Law of Unintended Consequences scalability is even a bigger problem when it comes to SOA, because you have even less information how much and when your service will be consumed.
And as I wrote in SOA Governance - Who Cares? the large vendors are focused on selling their SOA governance products and relying on either Web Services or their same old J2EE app servers for the service implementation itself.
In his data post, Dave continues to nail it, bringing up the issue of not dealing with data and the service logic holistically in most SOA environments. Dave is obviously a guy who is out there in the real world.
At GigaSpaces, we are already seeing the need for a new approach to implementing services, especially with our capital markets customers and their very high-throughput, low-latency stateful front office trading and real-time analytics apps. And that is what Space-Based Architecture and our eXtreme Application Platform are all about.
We have recently posted a great example and explanation on implementing high-performance, scalable SOA using SBA and in the context of our new API - the OpenSpaces framework on our award-winning Wiki. Check it out. (BTW, It's still a work in progress).
Update: Check out this presentation from Guy Nirpaz at JavaPolis on Space-Based Architecture and Scalable SOA.
Update 1: Nati Shalom writes about this topic here.
