I was talking with a friend of mine today and he was making fun of the fact that I call myself an SOA Evangelist. He said there are some interesting anagrams for evangelist, so I had to go see. Here are some interesting ones that came up for SOA Evangelist:
Galvanise Toes
Navigates Loses
Nostalgia Eves
Salvation Gees
Envisage Altos
Negative Lasso
Gasolene Vista
Naivetes Goals
Loveseat Gains
Eating Salvoes (Cheers)
A Evangelist So (should be a question... A evangelist, so?)
A Negative Loss
A Navel Egoists
A Goat Evilness
Again Lose Vest
In particular I think the Naivetes Goal and Negative Lasso are particularly interesting.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Intersection between Enterprise Architcture, ITIL and the SOA Movement
The past few weeks I have had an ephitheny about the relationship between ITIL and Enterprise Architecture. The relationships that the Enterprise Architecture bricks describe the information needed for a configuration item (CI) inside of the CMDB. That a CI has to have a type associated with it and that type should be a brick inside of EA.
How I came about this discovery is I was trying to figure out what are the CI for our application infrastructure. It seem to me that ITIL focused on the component aspect of things inside of the production environment. This usually consisted of things like physical devices and brought-in software. But the more I thought about that, it seemed as if something was missing. Bespoke (British for custom-made) software (stuff you build yourself) didn't seem to be as well covered.
So, it seemed as if the connection between the service provided and the hardware, software used were connected through some indirect way. However accurate, it seem something was missing.
Dr. Warner Vogel, CTO of Amazon, gave a speech on Enterprise Architecture where he indicated that Amazon was really a platform where buyers and sellers get together. The largest seller using the Amazon Platform was the Amazon Store. But when you think of Amazon, you have to think of the various domains that are interconnected. One domain is the platform which does things like provides services such as item management, buyer-centric human and systemic interfaces, seller-centric human and systemic interfaces, shopping cart management, promotions, advertiser-centric human and systemic interface, etc.
But there are other domains involved in the ecosystem. Front-end providers which sell through their interfaces items in the Amazon product set. Also, you have product providers (sellers) which offer their products and services as part of the Amazon product set. Another domain is the actual buyer who has their own process of purchasing a product that may connect to any of these sellers.
The point is that there are many intersections between these domains. That became significant to me in my quest for understanding. I asked myself, "What is really happening at these intersections." The answer I got was that control was being transferred.
In this diagram, you see that there is an interdependency between these domains. In particular, there are processes inside these domains that temporarily pass control (perhaps asynchronously) to the provider domain, which in turn can pass control, etc. When I thought about this harder, I came to the conclusion that there were two views into this intersection: the Interface and Interaction.
The interaction defines the reason for the intersection between the domain. Such as Request to purchase item or inquiry of books with "Amazon" in its title. An interface, however, is the actual connection between the domains. A "request to purchase item" can be connected to a consumer via multiple interface. There might be human or systemic. Said another way: the reason for the connection from the consumer process is the same regard of the method (interface) of connecting.
It was at this moment, that I realized that the domain boundary became critically important for sanity. So, that begged the question, "What is inside of the domain and what is outside?" and "What really is a domain?"
My conclusion is that a domain is an unit of authority that accomplishes work, orchestrates that work, provides and consumes services (collection of work) to other domains and manages exceptions, situations inside its sphere of control. Interactions specifically are what connect the processes (orchestrator) to other domains.
How I came about this discovery is I was trying to figure out what are the CI for our application infrastructure. It seem to me that ITIL focused on the component aspect of things inside of the production environment. This usually consisted of things like physical devices and brought-in software. But the more I thought about that, it seemed as if something was missing. Bespoke (British for custom-made) software (stuff you build yourself) didn't seem to be as well covered.
So, it seemed as if the connection between the service provided and the hardware, software used were connected through some indirect way. However accurate, it seem something was missing.
Dr. Warner Vogel, CTO of Amazon, gave a speech on Enterprise Architecture where he indicated that Amazon was really a platform where buyers and sellers get together. The largest seller using the Amazon Platform was the Amazon Store. But when you think of Amazon, you have to think of the various domains that are interconnected. One domain is the platform which does things like provides services such as item management, buyer-centric human and systemic interfaces, seller-centric human and systemic interfaces, shopping cart management, promotions, advertiser-centric human and systemic interface, etc.
But there are other domains involved in the ecosystem. Front-end providers which sell through their interfaces items in the Amazon product set. Also, you have product providers (sellers) which offer their products and services as part of the Amazon product set. Another domain is the actual buyer who has their own process of purchasing a product that may connect to any of these sellers.
The point is that there are many intersections between these domains. That became significant to me in my quest for understanding. I asked myself, "What is really happening at these intersections." The answer I got was that control was being transferred.
In this diagram, you see that there is an interdependency between these domains. In particular, there are processes inside these domains that temporarily pass control (perhaps asynchronously) to the provider domain, which in turn can pass control, etc. When I thought about this harder, I came to the conclusion that there were two views into this intersection: the Interface and Interaction.
The interaction defines the reason for the intersection between the domain. Such as Request to purchase item or inquiry of books with "Amazon" in its title. An interface, however, is the actual connection between the domains. A "request to purchase item" can be connected to a consumer via multiple interface. There might be human or systemic. Said another way: the reason for the connection from the consumer process is the same regard of the method (interface) of connecting.
It was at this moment, that I realized that the domain boundary became critically important for sanity. So, that begged the question, "What is inside of the domain and what is outside?" and "What really is a domain?"
My conclusion is that a domain is an unit of authority that accomplishes work, orchestrates that work, provides and consumes services (collection of work) to other domains and manages exceptions, situations inside its sphere of control. Interactions specifically are what connect the processes (orchestrator) to other domains.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
What does everyone keep considering WS-* as SOA?
I was reading Dana Gardner's blog on WOA will soon eclipse SOA as most impactful business transformation agent. I am confused why there is even a challenge.
Even at Gartner's Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit Dec 2008 in Las Vegas had two men I highly respect Roy Schulte and Nick Gall (blog) had a point-counterpoint discussion about WS-* vs. REST. Although it was very fun to listen and participate, I believe that when statements about WOA replacing SOA doesn't seem to jive with me.
To me, SOA is more about take functionality and making it abstract, network-able and find-able. I believe that it's goal is to abstract functionality to the level that business people can understand and use it. That is why SOA is an incredible partner with Event Driven Architecture, BPM, BAM, Mash-ups, etc. When a business person (I would dare say the new "programmer") can understand the command of our new paradigm, productivity and effectiveness will go through the roof.
Perhaps the discussion focuses more around which is a better protocol for getting at the information. REST or WS-*. In that context, there is a lot of worthwhile debate. But I don't think an answer either way would make "WOA replace SOA" I think they are on different layers of abstraction.
I read a presentation of Nick Gall's (don't have the reference) and it said "We made software because hardware was too hard. Now software isn't soft enough. What is softer than software?" This is the problem I want to solve. I believe that the coordinated application of EDA (CEP), SOA, BPM, BAM in concert with a business awareness found in Enterprise Architecture will lead us down to the solution of Nick's challenge.
Even at Gartner's Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit Dec 2008 in Las Vegas had two men I highly respect Roy Schulte and Nick Gall (blog) had a point-counterpoint discussion about WS-* vs. REST. Although it was very fun to listen and participate, I believe that when statements about WOA replacing SOA doesn't seem to jive with me.
To me, SOA is more about take functionality and making it abstract, network-able and find-able. I believe that it's goal is to abstract functionality to the level that business people can understand and use it. That is why SOA is an incredible partner with Event Driven Architecture, BPM, BAM, Mash-ups, etc. When a business person (I would dare say the new "programmer") can understand the command of our new paradigm, productivity and effectiveness will go through the roof.
Perhaps the discussion focuses more around which is a better protocol for getting at the information. REST or WS-*. In that context, there is a lot of worthwhile debate. But I don't think an answer either way would make "WOA replace SOA" I think they are on different layers of abstraction.
I read a presentation of Nick Gall's (don't have the reference) and it said "We made software because hardware was too hard. Now software isn't soft enough. What is softer than software?" This is the problem I want to solve. I believe that the coordinated application of EDA (CEP), SOA, BPM, BAM in concert with a business awareness found in Enterprise Architecture will lead us down to the solution of Nick's challenge.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
NOREX State & Local Government Forum Speech
It's been a while since I blogged. I have let circumstances of life erode away the goal of writing 20 minutes a day. Thats not good! :)
Anyways, I was asked by a group called NOREX to lead off a forum on SOA. In order to better understand this, let me give a bit of background on NOREX. In essence they are facilitators. They have meetings and teleforums where they talk about technology without all the vendors pressing their individual goals.
I was told that most people attending this session would be still in the introduction or early implementation. This is my lead in for the SOA Teleforum. Hope it can benefit someone.
Jeff
What is SOA?
NOREX State & Local Government Forum
SOA Teleconference
As you know, SOA has been having a lot of hype lately and probably why we are discussion it today. SOA was coined by Gartner Analysts Roy Schulte and Yefim Natis and has been like gangbusters ever since.
But what is it? What is about this new “architectural style” that gets people excited and gets Gartner to say that by 2010, this style will be used in more than 80% of new mission-critical applications?
If we extend the Acronym, we get Service-Oriented Architecture. I’m sure you already realize that Service is the key word, but how does that apply. If you look at any other field, a service is something that is done for the benefit of another. You could look at this as an electrical or water service, or restaurant waiters or tax accountants. This definition is exactly what is meant by the service in service-oriented architecture. A piece of software that does something for another. However, all of the other examples have another thing in common: multiple consumers of their service or put another way, they were not created for the expressed purpose of one consumer. If we look at tax accountants, he or she follows the same set of rules, procedures, etc for every consumer that uses the service although each may take a different path inside the process based on individual circumstances. The tax accountant is consumer-agnostic. The service is not built for the needs of 1 consumer, but all or a large set of consumers. The Service as part of SOA is the same way. As an example, if we build a web-service that is designed to accept input from a single source, then it is not a service, but rather an API or Application Program Interface only.
So, let us take a look at the key principles an SOA must meet:
• Modular
• Loosely coupled
• Distributed or networked
• Contractual
• Consumer-agnostic
• Abstraction and understandable
Modular and loosely coupled are things that Computer Science professors kept drilling into our heads. The saying that I had to learn is “Maximize Cohesion while Minimize Coupling.” SOA enables both of these concepts. As an industry, we have been trying to get this going for a long time. In particular, modular programming, APIs, DLL, CORBA have all been trying to accomplish this goal. We are continuing the work.
Distributed or networked is very critical. A lot of the programs that have created over the years put the intelligence of the program deep inside. To understand this, think of a billing system or point of sales system. The functional piece of code that calculates sales tax is used over and over, but generally is buried deep inside of the code or accessible only via DLL or library. Distributed or Networked principle says that it has to be accessible via the network or more precisely that it is not loaded as part of the code base of the consumer as would be in a DLL or library.
Contractual principle is a very interesting one. Any real-world service has either an implied or explicit contract. When you drop your clothes off at the dry-cleaners, you determine a price via a chart; you choose a pickup based on rules; you choose starch and other options. The same thing applies with SOA. You have a contract that indicates what will be done, the functional and non-functional requirements, you indicate the semantic definitions.
Consumer-agnostic we discussed earlier, but in essence, you build a service for a large set of consumers not one consumer. That isn’t to say that you might not build something as version 1 to fit a single consumer and then increase its consumer-agnostic ability as we get into version 2,3 etc. This amount of this attribute is directly proportional to the ability to increase reuse.
I saved Abstract and understandable to last because it is the most important. In fact, I called SOA: Service-oriented Abstraction. Abstraction is the ability to make a complex item knowable. It allows us to conceptualize. It is this conceptualization that allows designers to use it. A computer example is the idea of a disk folder. There is a lot of complexity to being able to read and write to a disk drive. Years ago, device drivers were created that generalized this and made a common interface and then visual folders were created. So now we have only had to drop a file inside of a folder and the machine takes care of getting it written to the actual physical hard drive. Services allow the ability to abstract. The question is at what level of abstraction you build your services. We could build a service pretty low level and just make some functionality like save-to-disk or we could make our services higher level and make it something that the business user will be able to understand such as calculate sales tax or create order. By building higher level services, then we increase the opportunity to allow business users to be more actively involved and even to be building their own code.
As you can see, all of these principles build upon each other. It is the building that makes things
This presentation would be wrong if I didn’t at least say how we can use these services. Once we have built services, we need to figure out how to apply them. Obviously, we can use them inside of traditional application code. We can build applications that leverage services from other agencies or external entities. We could also use business process management (BPM) to define the business processes of our agency. By building higher level of abstraction services, business users can create or change their process to innovate. IT needs to be involved from assurance, testing, etc. perspective, but this will allow a better integration between the business and information technology.
Still other perspectives are web 2.0 concepts like mashups where people take functionality and data from different places and combine it in a new way. Perhaps by solving a problem that is high priority for them, but low priority for the enterprise.
You will notice that I never equated SOA with web services or REST or CORBA. I believe the concepts are not equivalent. The latter are transports or how I get it from here to there. But by using the principles I laid out, and then we will be pulling the functionality and data that are trapped in the bowels of our applications and bring it to the surface where we can build off of it and inter-collaborate better than ever before.
Anyways, I was asked by a group called NOREX to lead off a forum on SOA. In order to better understand this, let me give a bit of background on NOREX. In essence they are facilitators. They have meetings and teleforums where they talk about technology without all the vendors pressing their individual goals.
I was told that most people attending this session would be still in the introduction or early implementation. This is my lead in for the SOA Teleforum. Hope it can benefit someone.
Jeff
NOREX State & Local Government Forum
SOA Teleconference
As you know, SOA has been having a lot of hype lately and probably why we are discussion it today. SOA was coined by Gartner Analysts Roy Schulte and Yefim Natis and has been like gangbusters ever since.
But what is it? What is about this new “architectural style” that gets people excited and gets Gartner to say that by 2010, this style will be used in more than 80% of new mission-critical applications?
If we extend the Acronym, we get Service-Oriented Architecture. I’m sure you already realize that Service is the key word, but how does that apply. If you look at any other field, a service is something that is done for the benefit of another. You could look at this as an electrical or water service, or restaurant waiters or tax accountants. This definition is exactly what is meant by the service in service-oriented architecture. A piece of software that does something for another. However, all of the other examples have another thing in common: multiple consumers of their service or put another way, they were not created for the expressed purpose of one consumer. If we look at tax accountants, he or she follows the same set of rules, procedures, etc for every consumer that uses the service although each may take a different path inside the process based on individual circumstances. The tax accountant is consumer-agnostic. The service is not built for the needs of 1 consumer, but all or a large set of consumers. The Service as part of SOA is the same way. As an example, if we build a web-service that is designed to accept input from a single source, then it is not a service, but rather an API or Application Program Interface only.
So, let us take a look at the key principles an SOA must meet:
• Modular
• Loosely coupled
• Distributed or networked
• Contractual
• Consumer-agnostic
• Abstraction and understandable
Modular and loosely coupled are things that Computer Science professors kept drilling into our heads. The saying that I had to learn is “Maximize Cohesion while Minimize Coupling.” SOA enables both of these concepts. As an industry, we have been trying to get this going for a long time. In particular, modular programming, APIs, DLL, CORBA have all been trying to accomplish this goal. We are continuing the work.
Distributed or networked is very critical. A lot of the programs that have created over the years put the intelligence of the program deep inside. To understand this, think of a billing system or point of sales system. The functional piece of code that calculates sales tax is used over and over, but generally is buried deep inside of the code or accessible only via DLL or library. Distributed or Networked principle says that it has to be accessible via the network or more precisely that it is not loaded as part of the code base of the consumer as would be in a DLL or library.
Contractual principle is a very interesting one. Any real-world service has either an implied or explicit contract. When you drop your clothes off at the dry-cleaners, you determine a price via a chart; you choose a pickup based on rules; you choose starch and other options. The same thing applies with SOA. You have a contract that indicates what will be done, the functional and non-functional requirements, you indicate the semantic definitions.
Consumer-agnostic we discussed earlier, but in essence, you build a service for a large set of consumers not one consumer. That isn’t to say that you might not build something as version 1 to fit a single consumer and then increase its consumer-agnostic ability as we get into version 2,3 etc. This amount of this attribute is directly proportional to the ability to increase reuse.
I saved Abstract and understandable to last because it is the most important. In fact, I called SOA: Service-oriented Abstraction. Abstraction is the ability to make a complex item knowable. It allows us to conceptualize. It is this conceptualization that allows designers to use it. A computer example is the idea of a disk folder. There is a lot of complexity to being able to read and write to a disk drive. Years ago, device drivers were created that generalized this and made a common interface and then visual folders were created. So now we have only had to drop a file inside of a folder and the machine takes care of getting it written to the actual physical hard drive. Services allow the ability to abstract. The question is at what level of abstraction you build your services. We could build a service pretty low level and just make some functionality like save-to-disk or we could make our services higher level and make it something that the business user will be able to understand such as calculate sales tax or create order. By building higher level services, then we increase the opportunity to allow business users to be more actively involved and even to be building their own code.
As you can see, all of these principles build upon each other. It is the building that makes things
This presentation would be wrong if I didn’t at least say how we can use these services. Once we have built services, we need to figure out how to apply them. Obviously, we can use them inside of traditional application code. We can build applications that leverage services from other agencies or external entities. We could also use business process management (BPM) to define the business processes of our agency. By building higher level of abstraction services, business users can create or change their process to innovate. IT needs to be involved from assurance, testing, etc. perspective, but this will allow a better integration between the business and information technology.
Still other perspectives are web 2.0 concepts like mashups where people take functionality and data from different places and combine it in a new way. Perhaps by solving a problem that is high priority for them, but low priority for the enterprise.
You will notice that I never equated SOA with web services or REST or CORBA. I believe the concepts are not equivalent. The latter are transports or how I get it from here to there. But by using the principles I laid out, and then we will be pulling the functionality and data that are trapped in the bowels of our applications and bring it to the surface where we can build off of it and inter-collaborate better than ever before.
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