Network infrastructure vendors also are moving into SOA through a fifth category, the ADC (application delivery controller), which provides hardware acceleration for some important features of the other four.
These categories overlap in functionality, leading many IT professionals to consider bypassing one or more. This can be a sensible strategy, as governance and hardware off-load are really necessary only for relatively large infrastructures (see "SOA Start-Up Checklist" ). Truth is, some shops can get by without any of these tools. If you simply want to give your old COBOL mainframe applications a shiny new Web 2.0 user interface, for example, you don't need SOA. Purists deride this architecture as "Just A Bunch of Web Services," or JABOWS, but it works for many organizations--at least for awhile.
With so much overlap, consolidation is inevitable. And indeed, SOA vendors are extending their feature sets into rivals' spaces or simply buying up one another, creating integration issues of their own. And this convergence isn't just among SOA product categories: Application-platform vendors are moving to incorporate ESB and governance functionality, while network infrastructure players are edging into the management and security spaces. You need a scorecard to keep up (see the table in the gallery).
Combining applications with the network infrastructure has obvious risks: It could destabilize both, and baking ever-changing Web services standards into hardware doesn't exactly sound like a path to IT agility. Yes, firmware updates and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) can help hardware keep up with changes, but they can't match the easy, visual development environments that SOA is supposed to enable.
Take Cisco Systems' Application Oriented Networking (AON), a technology that embeds XML processing in switches or routers. Cisco has spent two years preaching AON's benefits ... so far with little success. Much of IT's resistance comes from still thinking of applications as monolithic blocks of software code. SOA is all about breaking apps up into smaller services, some of which might be appropriate for a switch or a network appliance. Others, however, may be better off on a mainframe or server, while a few can be provided by an external ASP, even a public Web site.
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NWC ANALYTICS
 Strategic SOA Management Tech ReportDelve into the top six concerns held by IT professionals managing emerging service-oriented architectures: |
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