Re: SOA and Lego

ZapThink recently posted some parallels between SOA and Lego. I think that a lot of what was written there is fine in terms of market-speak but one point, hidden somewhere in the middle, deserves a lot more attention:

"...without architecture, a bunch of Services is little more than, well, a bunch of Services"

And like we already know, architecture isn't easy. Good architecture is damned hard. So, why the focus on services? Well, for those practicing architecture, the concept of a service fills in the top level abstraction we were looking for to describe large-scale systems. Unfortunately, the marketing guys got hold of the term and then the circus began.

Bottom line, then:

Don't start mucking around with services until you have a solid architectural foundation.

Posted by Udi Dahan at 03:32 PM  Permalink