Bobby Woolf penned a great article:
Clients often want to build only an ESB because that involves a technology challenge without the need for messy business requirements. Building just an ESB becomes an IT field of dreams, where IT builds an ESB and then hopes some SOA will come along and use it. Such an ESB-oriented architecture loses the benefits of SOA. It does not create business value. In fact, it incurs cost without reaping immediate benefit.
There in black and white is what happens when the focus becomes purely technological - no (business) value. The answer is an ESB, now what’s the question? A few years back we were saying:
The answer is WS-Deathstar, now what’s the question?
Before that it was:
The answer is an application server, now what’s the question?
Still further back we had:
The answer is a database, now what’s the question?
Silver bullet after silver bullet, when will we learn? Not for as long as we pursue technology for technology’s sake (death by technology). No doubt it’s rewarding for many a geek, fun for sure but it’s appropriate and innovative application of technology to a problem that matters (vision followed by implementation reality). Deploying a piece of technology on the basis that one might use or benefit from it’s presence in the future is simply foolish. It goes against the YAGNI principle for starters.
INATT is heard in the SOA realm partly because some parties are attempting to move beyond the endless hype curve/silver bullet delusion. Andrew McAfee appears to have been fortunate having clients that don’t suffer from death by technology. However judging by the experiences of Mr Woolf and myself not everyone is immune. So let’s talk tech but please only in the context of achieving a greater goal (unproven cost reduction promises don’t count). By way of example, consider this quote from Vogels:
Growth is core to Amazon.com’s business strategy, and that has had a significant impact on the way we use technology: growth through more categories, a larger selection, more services, more buying customers, more sellers, more merchants, more developers, increasing the different access methods, and expanding delivery mechanisms. The impact has been on many areas: larger data sets, faster update rates, more requests, more services, tighter SLAs (service-level agreements), more failures, more latency challenges, more service interdependencies, more developers, more documentation, more programs, more servers, more networks, more data centers. A large part of Amazon.com’s technology evolution has been driven to enable this continuing growth, to be ultra-scalable while maintaining availability and performance.
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