Archive for the ‘ESB’ Category

Microservices Architecture versus SOA

TechTarget has published another one of my “Ask the Expert” columns.  In this one, I offer up my thoughts on the differences between a Microservices Architecture and a SOA.  In a nutshell, I think the microservices trend has moved things in the right direction, a direction that many of the SOA pundits were espousing back in the mid-2000’s.  Regardless of what we were saying, however, there’s no denying that the reality of SOA back then was still more of service enabled architecture then service oriented architecture.  Give my thoughts a read, and feel free to post comments and questions in the discussion section over there. 

Oracle OpenWorld: The Big BPEL-ESB-OSB cook-off

Full disclosure: I am attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The speaker in this session is Andreas Chatziantoniou from Accenture.  He’s discussing the overlap between Oracle’s BPEL, ESB (legacy Oracle), and OSB (BEA ESB) products. 

First up is BPEL.  His slide states that BPEL should be used for system to system or service orchestration, when human workflow is needed, and when there are parallel request-response patterns.  The next slide says that BPEL should not be used for complex data transformations, it should not be used to program, and should not be used as a business modeling tool.  At first glance, this may seem strange, but I think it’s more of an indication that BPEL is something that gets generated by your tool, it’s not something people should be editing directly.  This point could be made more clearly.  He is emphasizing that you should not use BPELJ (embedded Java in BPEL).

He’s now talking about “dehydration,” a term I had not heard before.  He’s using that to refer to the writing of a process state to disk so it can be restored at a later time.  He stated that this is a natural part of BPEL, but not part of ESB/OSB.  I can live with that.  A service bus shouldn’t be doing dehydration any more than a network switch should be.

Now on to ESB/OSB.  His slide says they should be used for loose coupling, location transparency, mediation, error handling, transformation, load balancing, security, and monitoring.  Good list, although it does have the two grey areas of mediation and transformation.  You need to further define what types of mediation and transformation should and should not be done.  The way I’ve phrased it is that ESB’s should be about standards-in and standards-out.  As long as you’re mediating and transforming between standards (and the same standards on both sides), it’s a good fit.  If you are transforming between external and internal standards, as is the case in an external gateway, consider whether your ESB is the right fit for this since these mappings can get quite complicated. Those are my words, not the speakers, sorry this is something I’ve thought a lot about.

He’s now talking about mediation, and specifically referring to a component that existed in Oracle’s legacy ESB.  He said it connects components in a composite application.  To me, this does not belong in a service bus, and in the case of Oracle Service Bus, it does not.  He did not go into more detail on the type of mediation (e.g. security token mediation, message schema mediation, transport mediation).  As previously said, this needs to be made more narrow to make an appropriate decision on whether your mediation is really new business logic that belongs on a development platform, or mediation between supported standards than can be done by your connectivity infrastructure.

On transformation, Andreas focused more on what the platforms can do, rather on what they should do, calling out that XML transformations via XQuery, XSLT, et. can be equally done on any of the platforms.  His advice was do it in the service bus, and avoid mixed scenarios.  I’m really surprised at that, given how CPU-intensive transformations and mappings can be.  His point was that in a very large (50-60 steps) BPEL process, handling transformations could get ugly.  I see the logic on this, but I think if you do the analysis on where those transformations are needed, it may only be in one activity and best handled by the platform for that activity itself.

Overall, the speaker spent to much time discussing what the products can do, calling out overlaps, and not enough time on what they should do.   There was some good advice for customers, but I think it could have been made much simpler. My take on this whole debate  has always been straightforward.  A BPEL engine is a service development platform.  You use it to build new services that are most likely some composite of existing services.  I like to think of it as an orchestrated service platform.  As I previously said, though, you don’t write BPEL.  You use the graphical modeler for your tool, and behind the scenes, it may (or may not) be creating BPEL. 

A service bus is a service intermediary.  You don’t use it to build services, you use it to connect service consumers and service providers.  Unfortunately, in trying to market the service bus, most vendors succumbed to feature creep, whether due to creating their ESB from a legacy EAI product, or by adding more development like features to get more sales.  Think of it as a very intelligent router, meant to be configured by Operations, not coded by developers.

Oracle OpenWorld: Using Oracle Web Services Manager to Manage Security

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

I’m having to recreate this post thanks to a bug in WordPress for the iPhone which managed to eat a couple posts, so my apologies for it being a bit shorter than hoped, since I had to recall what I was typing live.

In this talk, Vikas Jain gave an overview of Oracle Web Services Manager, and Josh Bregman (I think) gave a demo of integration between Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) and Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). For most of his portion, Vikas went over the architecture behind WSM. It hasn’t changed too dramatically since I first saw it back as Confluent years ago, and that’s a good thing, since it had proper separation between policy enforcement and policy management. One thing I didn’t know, which is a good thing, is that the WSM enforcement point is now an embedded agent within WebLogic Server. That is, it comes with WebLogic server, there’s no separate install for it. This is a very important point, because if you need to do end-to-end identity propagation, you’ll need some kind of agent or native support for your identity formats on every node in the call chain. They did mention E2E identity propagation on a slide, but they didn’t go into any depth on it.

From a feature standpoint, OWSM has all of the necessary WS-* features necessary, including WS-Policy, WS-Security, SAML support, and WS-ReliableMessaging to name a few.

One thing I was disappointed with is when they presented a slide on integrations with the rest of the fusion middleware, Oracle Service Bus was not shown. SOA and WebLogic was a line item, and since OSB runs on WebLogic, it could be inferred that there’s a relationship, but what I wanted to know about was the significant functionality overlap between OSB and OWSM. I did get to ask about this, and the first answer was that they felt there wasn’t a lot of overlap, and frankly, I don’t agree with that in the slightest. On the plus side, however, they did say that in a future release of Oracle Service Bus, the security features of OSB will be fully provided by the OWSM agent, and not by the underlying WebLogic (non-OWSM) capabilities as is currently done. If this is the case, then they are working to eliminate the functional overlap, however, there’s a long way to go. Oracle Service Bus is a policy enforcement point, just as Oracle Web Service Manager agents are. OWSM can do more than just security, just as OSB can. Hopefully, this will be resolved in the future, and customers will not have to choose between two products from the same vendor to attack the same problem of enforcing service contract policies through a service intermediary.

Most Read Posts for 2008

According to Google Analytics, here are the top read posts from my blog for 2008. This obviously doesn’t account for people who read exclusively through the RSS feed, but it’s interesting to know what posts people have stumbled upon via Google search, etc.

10. Governance Does Not Imply Command and Control. This was posted in August of 2008, and intended to change the negative opinion many people have about the term “governance.”

9. To ESB or not to ESB. This was posted in July of 2007, and gave a listing of five different types of ESBs that exist today and how they may (or may not) fit into your environment.

8. Getting Started with SOA Governance. This was posted in September of 2008, just before my book was released. It emphasizes a policy first approach, stressing education over enforcement.

7. Dish DVR Upgrade. This was posted in November of 2007 and had little to do with SOA. It tells the story of how Dish Network pushed out an upgrade to the software on their DVRs that wiped out all of my existing timers, and I missed recording some shows as a result. The lesson for IT: even if you think there’s no chance that a change will impact someone, you still should make them aware that a change is occurring.

6. Most popular posts to date. This is rather humorous. This post from July of 2007 was much like this one. A list of posts that Google Analytics had shown as most viewed since January of 2006. Maybe this one will show up next year. It at least means someone enjoys these summary posts.

5. Dilbert’s Guide to Governance. In this post from June of 2007, I offered some commentary on governance in the context of a Dilbert cartoon that was published around the same timeframe.

4. Service Taxonomy. Based upon an analysis of search keywords people use that result in them visiting my pages, I’m not surprised to see this one here. This was posted in December of 2006, and while it doesn’t provide a taxonomy, it provides two reasons for having taxonomies: determining service ownership and choosing the technical implementation platform. I don’t think you should have taxonomies just to have taxonomies. If the classification isn’t serving a purpose, it’s just clutter.

3. Horizontal and Vertical Thinking. This was posted in May of 2007 and is still one of my favorite posts. I think it really captures the change in thinking that is required for more strategic solutions, however, I also now realize that the challenge is in determining when horizontal thinking is needed and when it is not. It’s not an easy question and requires a broad understanding of the business to answer correctly.

2. SOA Governance Book. This was posted in September of 2008 and is when I announced that I had been working on a book. Originally, this had a link to the pre-order page from the publisher, later updated to include direct links there and to the page on Amazon. You can also get it from Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, and other online bookstores.

1. ITIL and SOA. Seeing this post come in at number one was a surprise to me. I’m glad to see it up there, however, as it is something I’m currently involved with, and also an area in need of better information. There are so many parallels between these two efforts, and it’s important to eliminate the barriers between the developer/architecture world of SOA and the infrastructure/operations world of ITIL/ITSM. Look for more posts on this subject in 2009.

Comments on TUCON 2008 Podcast

Dana Gardner moderated a panel discussion at Tibco’s User Conference (TUCON) on Service Performance Management and SOA. There were some great nuggets in this session, I encourage you to listen to the podcast or read the transcript. The panelists were Sandy Rogers of IDC, Joe McKendrick, Anthony Abbattista of Allstate, and Rourke McNamara of TIBCO.

First, Sandy Rogers of IDC commented that what she finds interesting “is that even if you have one service that you have deployed, you need to have as much information as possible around how it is being used and how the trending is happening regarding the up-tick in the consumption of the service across different applications, across different processes.” I couldn’t agree more on this item. I have seen first hand the value in collecting this information and making it available. Unfortunately, all too often, the need for this is missed when people are looking for funding. Funding is focused on building the service and getting it out the door on-time and on-budget, and operation concerns are left to classic up/down monitoring that never leaves the walls of IT operations. We need to adjust the culture so that monitoring of the usage is a key part of the project success. How can we make any statements on the value of a service, or any IT solution for that matter, if we aren’t monitoring how that service is being used? For example, I frequently see projects that are proposed to make some manual process more efficient. If that’s the value play, are we currently measuring the cost of the manual activity, and how are we quantifying the cost of doing it the new way? Looking at the end database probably isn’t good enough, because that only shows the end results of processing, not the pace of processing. Automated a process enables you to process more, but if demand is stable, the end result will still look the same. The difference lies in the fact that people (and systems) have more time available for other activities.

Sandy went on to state:

They (organizations) need a lot more visibility and an understanding of the strains that are happening on the system, and they need to really build up a level of trust. Once they can add on to the amount of individuals that have that visibility, that trust starts to develop, more reuse starts to happen, and it starts to take off.

Joe picked on this stating “that the foundation of SOA is trust.” No arguments here. If the culture of the organization is one of distrust, I see them of having very slim chances of having any success with SOA. Joe correctly called out that a lot of this hinges on governance. I personally believe that governance is how an organization changes behavior and culture. Lack of trust is a behavior and trust issue. Only by clearly stating what the desired behavior is and establishing policies that create that behavior can culture change happen.

Anthony provided a great anecdote from the roll-out of their ESB stating that they spent 18 months justifying its use and dealing with every outage starting with someone saying, “TIBCO is down.” In reality, it was usually some back end service or component being down, but since the TIBCO ESB was the new thing, everyone blamed it. By having great measurements and monitoring, they were able to get to root cause. I had the exact same situation at a prior company, and it was fun watching the shift as people blamed the new infrastructure, and I would say, “No, it’s up, and the metrics it has collected makes me think the problem is here.”

A bit later in the podcast, Joe mentioned a conversation with Rourke earlier in the day, commenting that “predictive analytics, which is a subset of business intelligence (BI), is now moving into the systems management space.” This sounds very familiar…

Rourke also made a great comment when referring to a customer who said “their biggest fear is that their SOA initiative will be a victim of its own success.” He went on to say:

That could make SOA a victim of its own success. They will have successfully sold the service, had it reused over and over and over and over again. But, then, because of that reuse, because they were successful in achieving the SOA dream, they now are going to suffer. All that business users will see from that is that “SOA is bad,” it makes my applications more fragile, it makes my applications slow down because so many people are using the same stuff.

That was a great point. SOA, if it is successful, should result in an increase in the number of dependencies associated with an IT solution. Many people shudder at that statement, but the important thing is that there should be those dependencies. What’s bad is when those dependencies aren’t effectively managed and monitored. The lack of effective management results in complicated, ad hoc processes that give the perceive that the technology landscape is overly complex.

This was one of the better panel discussion I’ve heard in a while. I encourage you to give it a listen.

Gartner AADI: State of SOA

Presenter: Daniel Sholler

Dan is largely presenting results from some surveys that Gartner has done. Highlights:

  1. Adoption is increasing, but so is number of organizations that are choosing to delay/do nothing
  2. Nearly all organizations are at maturity level 1
  3. Of the very few organizations that are above level 1, interest/usage in WOA/REST is increasing
  4. More mature organizations are using services for B2B and multi-channel applications
  5. Only 1/3 of organizations adopting SOA are using an ESB
  6. Stage 2 maturity companies have nearly double the number of service consumers for the same number of services as Stage 1 maturity companies
  7. “BPM is the ‘killer app’ for SOA”

My thoughts: Nothing really surprising here. I’m not at all surprised that we’re at a very early stage of maturity. The statement that the more mature organizations are pursuing B2B and multi-channel opportunities is an aberration, in my opinion. I think those are simply opportunities that some organizations have and other don’t, rather than being tied to the maturity of the organization. The bullet point that more mature organizations have twice the number of consumers was interesting to me. That one seems to make sense from a maturity standpoint. The BPM comment isn’t surprising at all, because I don’t think you can do a good job with BPM without having services.

Gartner AADI: SAP Presentation

I’m in a SAP session now. They’ve got their “End-to-End SOA Composition and Middleware Platform” picture up right now. It’s always nice when your vendor’s picture aligns with your own. Specifically, they have a separation between their Enterprise SOA Provisioning layer and their SOA Interoperability layer. Enterprise SOA Provisioning includes “Service and Event Enablement” and “Connectivity and Integration.” In SOA Interoperability, they have “Service Bus and SOA Management.” Thanks to the confusion between the ESB space and EAI space, these two layers are frequently combined, and I think they should be separate. The SOA Interoperability layer should be about mediating across a set of standards that the enterprise has adopted, which the enablement and integration layer is about hooking non-standard things into it. Push those pieces as close to the endpoints as possible, and put the stuff that’s required on all standards-based service messages in the middle. Unfortunately, they’ve now put up a slide on SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 and are positioning it to cover Service Bus, Service Integration, and SOA Management. So, conceptually they get it, but in terms of the product mapping, there could be some challenges if you don’t deploy it properly. If you separate out one PI environment for SOA Interoperability, and a second environment for Enablement and Integration, a lot of the potential risks can be mitigated.

Enterprises need to think architecture, not integration

In a blog entry last week and his podcast for this week, David Linthicum lamented the fact that many technology vendors are too focused on integration and not enough on architecture. My opinion on this is that the problem lies first with enterprises, and not with technology vendors.

In order to first explain this, I need to split the technology product space into two large groups. First, there are products that are pure infrastructure. They are platforms on which someone else builds solutions. This is the familiar space of database platforms, application servers, network appliances, EAI platforms, ESBs, MOM servers, etc. For products in this space, I have absolutely no problem with the vendors providing products that are focused on making integration easier. Does this enable enterprises to build up layers of “glue” in the middle? Absolutely, but at the same time, the enterprise had to have a need (whether perceived or real) to make their integration efforts easier.

The second group of technology products are the actual business solution providers, whether it’s a big suite from SAP or Oracle, web-based solutions like Workday and Salesforce.com, or anything in between. These vendors absolutely should be focused on architecture first. At the same time, I don’t think many of these products are being marketed and sold on their integration benefits, they’re being sold on their business capabilities.

So, what’s the problem then? The problem comes when the enterprise IT staff involved with technology identification and selection is too focused on integration, rather than architecture. Almost always, when I hear an enterprise talk about integration, it’s a just in time effort. Someone is building some new system and as part of the design of that system, they decide they need to talk to some other system. No thought of this need occurred in advance from either side of the integration effort. In putting together the solution, the focus is simply on the minimal amount of work to put the glue in the middle. As long as this trend continues, the infrastructure vendors are going to continue to market their products to this space. While it’s a noble quest to try to educate and market at the same time, it’s a risky strategy to present using a different mental model than your target audience.

The change that needs to occur is that integration needs to be a primary principle that is thought about at the time a system is placed into production. Normal behavior is to build a solution for my stakeholders and my users, and not think about anything else. In past posts (here, here), I’ve talked about three simple questions that all projects should start thinking about. One of those questions is “What services does your solution use / expose?” How many projects actually identifying anything other than just what their front end consumes? Does anyone see this as a problem? Let’s come back to the infrastructure vendors. They actually do need to think about architecture and services, but in a different space- management. I’ve railed on this in the past. How many vendors expose all of the capabilities in their user-facing management console through one or more service interfaces? If I want to embrace IT Systems Automation, how on earth am I going to do this what what these vendors give me? I’m not. I’m going to have to leverage management adapters in more automation environment. Does this sound familiar? It sure sounds like EAI to me. The best way I see to address this is think about integration in advance. Don’t think about it at the time someone comes and says, “I need to talk your system,” think about it at the time you build your solution and ask the question, “How will other systems need to interact with this.” Yes, this is a bit of predicting the future, and we’ll probably expose things that no one ever uses, but I think an enterprise will be in a better state if they try to anticipate in advance, thinking about architecture, rather that continue with today’s approach of integrate on demand.

The Future of ESBs

Yogish Pai had a interesting post titled, “A decision maker’s concern about ESB.” In it, he provided two quotes, one from a Chief Architect of a financial services company and another from a CTO of a transportation company, both of which were raising some concern about leveraging an ESB.

ESBs have been one of the more controversial technology products in quite some time. They’ve been attacked as either rebranded EAI technology or efforts by vendor to “sell SOA” when most of us pundits have all stated that you can’t buy SOA. I’ve posted in the past (here, here, and here) on ESBs with more of a neutral approach, discussing capabilities that are needed and simply pointing out that ESBs are one way of providing those capabilities, and that’s still my stance. I’ve had the opportunity to work with companies that had purchased an ESB as well as companies that wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. In both cases, the companies had found a suitable way to provide these capabilities, so you can’t say that one approach was better than the other.

What ultimately will decide the fate of the ESB will probably not be the specific technical capabilities associated with it, but the value that enterprises place on those capabilities. My past posts have stated my preference that the capabilities associated with the space really belong in the hands of operations rather than the hands of developers. As a result, you’d have to compare the cost/value of an ESB or other intermediary to the cost of other network intermediaries, such as switches, load balancers, and proxying appliances. Unfortunately, the ESB space is dominated not by traditional networking companies, but middleware companies. As a result, the products are being marketed to developers with feature after feature being thrown in, creating overlap with service hosting platforms, integration brokers, and orchestration engines. This dilutes the benefits of the core capabilities, and if anything, can make it more complicated to get those things done. In addition, these products may now clash with other products in the vendor’s portfolio, putting the sales staff in a difficult position.

The challenge that I see is that the value of a typical network load balancer from the view of a developer is pretty low. From their perspective, the features provided by the load balancer are minimal compared to what they need from the typical application server. As a result, I suspect that ESBs are very likely to become bundled capabilities rather than standalone products. It certainly means that there’s room for open source products, given that developers aren’t putting a lot of value to those capabilities, yet they are necessary. Open source products still need mindshare, however, so it will be interesting to see where it goes.

CapeClear and Workday

I saw the announcements yesterday that Workday had acquired CapeClear. This is an interesting acquisition. At first glance, I thought this was just normal evolution in the ERP space, except that Workday just happens to be a hosted solution. After all, Oracle and SAP both have integration products that enable integration with their backend applications, so why not Workday? The part of this that is a bit distressing, however, is that Workday is a new entrant into this space. A big reason that these integration products exist is because every application had its own proprietary integration approach. As the need to integrate became more and more important, the desire to standardize the integration approaches increased, and led to technologies like Web Services. Workday, as a relatively new player in the space, should have been able to go with standardized integration approaches from the start, significantly reducing the need for integration middleware. There will always be a need for something in the middle, but it should start to look more like network devices than complex middleware. If this theory is true, then why would Workday need to acquire an integration middleware company like CapeClear? Perhaps the only reasoning in this is that CapeClear had always tried to be more that just mediation fabric. After all, I had railed on CapeClear in the past when David Clarke said, “We consider ESB the principal container for business logic. This is the next generation application server.” It’s likely that Workday actually used them in this fashion, rather than as a lightweight mediation fabric that I prefer. If that’s the case, then it’s entirely possible that Workday was in a position where it would be too expensive to migrate to a traditional Java application server, and CapeClear was struggling being one of the few SOA startups left with rough economic times ahead. The best course for both parties, therefore, is the actions that have taken place. It will remain to be seen how well Workday can support the existing CapeClear customers who are using it as a mediation fabric, since their bread and butter is the ERP system, not middleware.

The Return of the ESB

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Just when you thought it was safe to build your SOA, the ESB has returned. A whitepaper from Paul Fremantle of WSO2 seems to have stirred the ESB pot once again, with a number of pundits chiming in on the future of the ESB. I was surprised at how little conversation there was about at the Gartner AADI Summit in comparison to the previous Gartner event I had attended two years prior, but that’s quickly changed.

I read Paul’s paper, and from my perspective, not much has changed from the views that I expressed two years ago back in a Burton Group Catalyst presentation and then in this followup blog post. The bulleted list of capabilities provided in that post aren’t ones that are going to go away, and it surprises me that there continues to be so much debate in this space.

Joe McKendrick recently summarized a number of recent comments in a blog entry, including ones from Roy Schulte of Gartner, Lief Davidson of IBM, ZDNet blogger Dana Gardner, and Lorraine Lawson of IT Business Edge (who has given a couple of my recent blogs some publicity, thanks for that). There were a couple things in Joe’s entry that just rubbed me the wrong way.

First is this notion of federated ESBs. Both Roy and Dana made comments around this, and I simply don’t agree. I’ll admit, there are a certain class of organizations that will have multiple ESBs. They’re the same organizations that have one of just about every technology because they’re so huge. Take them out of the equation, because I don’t believe they represent the masses. For the rest of us, what does “federated ESBs” mean? Does it mean that I have multiple ESBs performing redundant capabilities? Or does it mean that I partition up the capabilities across multiple products/devices, but yet with no two products providing the same capability, even though they may be capable of it? The latter is tolerable and likely, the former is not. For example, Roy mentioned security policies and quality of service. I may rely on an XML appliance for service security at the perimeter, and then rely on app server capabilities or some security agent within the data center. For simplicity sake, if we define quality of service as some form of intelligent routing and traffic shaping, I may rely on an ESB, a high-end XML appliance or network device, or advanced clustering capabilities of an app server. This type of partitioning makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is having one ESB (pick your favorite) providing security, QoS, etc. for services by development group A and having another ESB providing the same for services from development group B. To put it in context, routing is a core capability according to my definitions. Would you let development group A put a Cisco router in front of their services and development group B put a Juniper router in front of their services? You certainly wouldn’t do this if all of the services are hosted in the same data center. Yes, if your company has grown through acquisition and has lines of business all over the place, you may have different routers, but now we’re getting back to those super-large conglomerates I mentioned at the beginning. For those of you now envisioning the “big honking ESB,” don’t think that way. Think of it more like the network. I may have many deployments of a single ESB product, each handling a portion of the services in the enterprise, and their consumers know to direct to the appropriate ESB from design time rather than some uber-ESB. Applications point at specific databases or hostnames, there’s no reason that services can’t work the same way. Again, I don’t view this as federation.

What I believe we need to strive for in this space is centralized policy management and distributed enforcement, with standards based communication between the policy manager and the enforcement points (if only those standards existed). For example, one could make the argument that SAP could provide a second ESB that deals with services provided by the SAP infrastructure. I don’t view this as federation, however. From my perspective, I don’t even care whether SAP has an ESB or not. What I do care about is whether the entry points exposed by SAP can enforcement my QoS policies, my security policies, my versioning policies, etc. Let me centrally manage the policies, push them out, and have it just work. The challenge with this is not the enforcement architecture and federation there, but rather the metadata repository that will hold all of this policy information. This is where federation is important, because I may be getting third party products that come with their own pre-populated registry/repository of services that I need to manage.

The second statement that I disagreed with was Paul’s comment that ESBs discourage the shared ownership of services. If it does, then I think ESB ownership is the problem. Most web applications require the configuration of a load balancing farm before they can be accessed. No one considers the keeper of the farms in network operations the “owner” of those web applications, so why would the team responsible for the configuration of the ESB be considered the owner of services? Personally, I think a lot of this stems from ESBs being targeted at developers, rather than at operations teams. As I’ve commented in the past, I think the inclusion of service development capabilities like orchestration and the leftovers from the EAI space messed up the paradigm and caused confusion. Keep mediation separate from development.

So, as I climb down from my soap box, what are my parting words? I still believe that the capabilities in my post from last year are necessary, and an ESB is one way of providing those capabilities. Intermediaries are almost always used in web architectures, so there shouldn’t be such a strong aversion to having them as a front end to a service. That being said, too many intermediaries is a bad thing, because we haven’t gotten to the single pane of glass management that I think is necessary. Rather, each intermediary has its own management console, and the chances of something getting missed or fat-fingered goes up. Focus on an approach for centrally managing the policies, minimizing the number of places where policies are enforced, and keeping operational activities separated from service development activities.

Is it about the technology or not?

Courtesy of Nick Gall, this post from Andrew McAfee was brought to my attention. Andrew discusses a phrase which many of us have either heard or used, especially in discussions about SOA: “It’s not about the technology.” He premises that there are two meanings behind this statement:

  1. “The correct-but-bland meaning is ‘It’s not about the technology alone.’ In other words a piece of technology will not spontaneously or independently start delivering value, generating benefits, and doing precisely what its deployers want it to do.”
  2. “The other meaning … is ‘The details of this technology can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion.’ If true, this is great news for every generalist, because it means that they don’t need to take time to familiarize themselves with any aspect of the technology in question. They can just treat it as a black box that will convert specified inputs into specified outputs if installed correctly.”

In his post, Nick Gall states that discussions that are operating around the second meaning are “‘aspirational’ — the entire focus is on architectural goals without the slightest consideration of whether such goals are realistically achievable given current technology trends. However, if you try to shift the conversation from aspirations to how to achieve them, then you will inevitably hear the mantra ‘SOA is not about technology.'”

So is SOA about the technology or not? Nick mentions the Yahoo SOA group, of which I’m a member. The list is known for many debates on WS-* versus REST and even some Jini discussions. I don’t normally jump into some of these technology debates not because the technology doesn’t matter, but because I view these as implementation decisions that must be chosen based upon your desired capabilities and the relative priorities of those capabilities. Anne Thomas Manes makes a similar point in her response to these blogs.

As an example, back in 2006, the debate around SOA technology was centered squarely on the ESB. I gave a presentation on the subject of SOA infrastructure at Burton Group’s Catalyst conference that summer which discussed the overlapping product domains for “in the middle” infrastructure, which included ESBs. I specifically crafted my message to get people to think about the capabilities and operational model first, determining what your priorities are, and then go about picking your technology. If your desired capabilities are focused in the run-time operations (as opposed to a development activity like Orchestration) space, and if you developers are heavily involved with the run-time operations of your systems, technologies that are very developer-focused, such as most ESBs, may be your best option. If your developers are removed from run-time operations, you may want a more operations focused tool, such as a WSM or XML appliance product.

This is just one example, but I think it illustrates the message. Clearly, making statements that flat our ignore the technology is fraught with risk. Likewise, going deep on the technology without a clear understanding of the organization’s needs and culture is equally risky. You need to have balance. If your enterprise architects fall into Nick’s “aspirational” category, they need to get off their high horse and work with the engineers that are involved with the technology to understand what things are possible today, and what things aren’t. They need to be involved with the inevitable trade-offs that arise with technology decisions. If you don’t have enterprise architects, and have engineers with deep technical knowledge trying to push technology solutions into the enterprise, they need to be challenged to justify those solutions, beginning with a discussion on the capabilities provided, not on the technology providing them. Only after agreement on the capabilities can we now (and should) enter a discussion on why a particular technology is the right one.

Integration at the Desktop, Part 2

In addition to commenting on my blog, Francis Carden, CEO of OpenSpan, also was kind enough to give me a short demo of their product. In my previous post, I introduced the concept of a “Desktop Service Bus” and wondered if the product would behave in this fashion. One of the interesting things I hadn’t thought of, however, is exactly what a desktop service bus should behave like? For that matter, what’s the right model of working with an enterprise service bus? More on that in a second.

Francis did a nice little demonstration for me that showed how custom integrations could be built quickly, first by interrogating existing applications (desktop or web-based) and grabbing possible integration points (virtually any UI element on the screen), and then by using a visual editor to connect up components in a pipeline-like manner. If you’re familiar with server-side application integration technologies, think of this tool as providing an orchestration environment, as well as the ability to build adaptors on the fly through interrogation.

Clearly, this is a step in the right direction. Francis made a great comment to me, which was, “People stopped thinking about this [desktop integration] because they’d long forgotten it was possible.” He’s right about this. With the advent of web-based applications, many people stopped talking about OLE and other desktop application integration techniques. The need hasn’t gone away, however. Again, using the iPhone as an example, many people complain about its lack of cut-and-paste capabilities.

Bringing this back to my concept of a desktop service bus, there clearly is a long way to go. When I see tools like OpenSpan or Apple’s Automator, it’s clear that they’re targeted at when a need to integrate is determined after the fact. You have two systems that no one had thought of integrating previously, but now there is a need to do so. This is no different than integration on the server side, except that you’re much more likely to hear the term “silo” used. When I think about the concept of a desktop service bus, or even an enterprise service bus for that matter, the reason a usage metaphor doesn’t immediately come to mind is that it’s not the way we’ve traditionally done things. When we’re building a new solution, the collection of services available should simply be there. There’s a huge challenge in trying to organize them, but if we can organize all of the classes in the Java API’s and all of the variety of extensions through intelligent code completion, why can’t we do the same with services, whether available through a network interaction or through desktop integration? It will take a while before this becomes the norm, but thankfully, I think the connectivity of the web is actually helping in this regard. Users of sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the like expect the ability to mash and integrate, whether with their mobile phones, their desktop machines, other web sites, and more. Integration as the norm will be a requirement going forward.

Latest SOA Insights Podcast

Dana Gardner has posted the latest episode of his Briefings Direct: SOA Insights series. In this episode, the panelists (Tony Baer, Jim Kobielus, Brad Shimmin, and myself) along with guest Jim Ricotta, VP and General Manager of Appliances at IBM, discuss SOA Appliances and the recent announcements around the BPEL4People specification.

This conversation was particularly enjoyable for me, as I’ve spent a lot of time understanding the XML appliance space in the past. As I’ve blogged about in the past, there’s a natural convergence between software-based intermediaries like proxy servers and network appliances. I’ve learned a lot when working with my networking and security counterparts in trying to come up with the right solution. The other part of the conversation on BPEL4People was also fun, given my interests in human computer interaction. I encourage you to give it a listen, and feel free to send me any questions you may have, or suggestions for topics you’d like to see discussed.

To ESB or not to ESB

It’s been a while since I posted something more infrastructure related. Since my original post on the convergence of infrastructure in the middle was reasonably popular, I thought I’d talk specifically about the ESB: Enterprise Service Bus. As always, I hope to present a pragmatic view that will help you make decisions on whether an ESB is right for you, rather than coming out with a blanket opinion that ESBs are good, bad, or otherwise.

From information I’ve read, there are at least five types of ESBs that exist today:

  1. Formerly EAI, now ESB
  2. Formerly BPM, now ESB
  3. Formerly MOM/ORB, now ESB
  4. The WS-* Enabling ESB
  5. The ESB Gateway

Formerly EAI, now ESB

There’s no shortage of ESB products that people will claim are simply rebranding efforts of products formerly known as EAI tools. The biggest thing to consider with these is that they are developer tools. Their strengths are going to lie in their integration capabilities, typically in mapping between schemas and having a broad range of adapters for third party products. There’s no doubt that these products can save a lot of time when working with large commercial packages. At the same time, however, this would not be the approach I’d take for a load balancing or content-based routing solution. Those are typically operational concerns where we’d prefer to configure rather than code. Just because you have a graphical tool doesn’t mean it doesn’t require a developer to use it.

Formerly BPM, now ESB

Many ESBs are adding orchestration capabilities, a domain typically associated with BPM products. In fact, many BPM products are simply rebranding of EAI products, and there’s at least one I know of that is now also marketed as an ESB. There’s definitely a continuum here, and the theme is much the same. It’s a graphical modeling tool that is schema driven, possibly with built-in adapter technology, definitely with BPEL import/export, but still requires a developer to properly leverage it.

Both of these two categories are great if your problem set centers around orchestration and building new services in a more efficient manner. If you’re interested in sub-millisecond operations for security, routing, throttling, instrumentation, etc., recognize that these solutions are primarily targeted toward business processing and integration, not your typical “in-the-middle” non-functional concerns. It is certainly true that from a modeling perspective, the graphical representation of a processing pipeline is well-suited for the non-functional concerns, but it’s the execution performance that really matters.

Formerly MOM/ORB, now ESB

These products bring things much closer to non-functional world, although as more and more features are thrown at the ESB umbrella, they may start looking more like one of the first two approaches. In both cases, these products try to abstract away the underlying transport layer. In the case of MOM, all service communication is put onto some messaging backbone. The preferred model is to leverage agents/adapters on both endpoints (e.g. having a JMS client library for both the consumer and provider), potentially not requiring any centralized hub in the middle. The scalability of messaging systems certainly can’t be denied, however, the bigger concern is whether agents/adapters can be provided for all systems. All of the products will certainly have a fallback position of a gateway model via SOAP/HTTP or XML/HTTP, but you lose capabilities in doing so. For example, having endpoint agents can ensure reliable message delivery. If one endpoint doesn’t have it, you’ll only be reliable up to the gateway under control of the ESB. In other words, you’re only as good as your weakest link. One key factor in looking at this solution is the heterogeneity of your IT environment. The more varied systems you have, the greater challenge you have in finding an ESB that supports all of them. In an environment where performance is critical, these may be good options to investigate, knowing that a proprietary messaging backbone can yield excellent performance, versus trying to leverage something like WS-RM over HTTP. Once again, the operational model must be considered. If you need to change a contract between a consumer and a provider, the non-functional concerns are enforced at the endpoint adapters. These tools must have a model where those policies can be pushed out to the nodes, rather than requiring a developer to change some code or model and go through a development cycle.

The WS-* Enabling ESB

This category of product is the ESB that strives to allow an enterprise to have a WS-* based integration model. Unlike the MOM/ORB products, they probably only require the use of agents on the service provider side, essentially to provide some form of service enablement capability. In other words, a SOAP stack. While 5 years ago this may have been very important, most major platforms now provide SOAP stacks, and many of the large application vendors provide SOAP-based integration points. If you don’t have an enterprise application server, these may be worthwhile options to investigate, as you’ll need some form of SOAP stack. Unlike simply adding Axis on top of Tomcat, these options may provide the ability to have intercommunication between nodes, effectively like a clustered application server. If not apparent, however, these options are very developer focused. Service enablement is a development activity. Also, like the MOM/ORB solutions, these products can operate in a gateway mode, but you do lose capabilities. Like the BPM/EAI solutions, these products are focused on building services, so there’s a good chance that they may not perform as well for the “in-the-middle” capabilities typically associated with a gateway.

The ESB Gateway

Finally, there are ESB products that operate exclusively as a gateway. In some cases, this may be a hardware appliance, it could be software on commodity hardware, or it could be a software solution deployed as a stand-alone gateway. While the decision between a smart-network or smart-node approach is frequently a religious one, there are certainly scenarios where a gateway makes sense. Perimeter operations are the most common, but it’s also true that many organizations don’t employ clustering technologies in their application servers, but instead leverage front-end load balancers. If your needs focus exclusively on the “in-the-middle” capabilities, rather than on orchestration, service enablement, or integration, these products may provide the operational model (configure not code) and the performance you need. Unlike an EAI-rooted system, an appliance is typically not going to provide an integrate anything-to-anything model. Odds are that it will provide excellent performance along a smaller set of protocols, although there are integration appliances that can talk to quite a number of standards-based systems.

Final words

As I’ve stated before, the number one thing is to know what capabilities you need first, before ever looking at ESBs, application servers, gateways, appliances, web services management products, or anything else. You also need to know what the operational model is for those capabilities. Are you okay with everything being a development activity and going through a code release cycle, or are there things you want to be fully controlled by an operational staff that configures infrastructure according to a standard change management practice? There’s no right or wrong answer, it all depends on what you need. Orchestration may be the number one concern for some. Service-enablement of legacy systems to another. Another organization may need security and rate throttling at the perimeter. Hopefully this post will help you on your decision making process. If I missed some of the ESB models out there or if you disagree with this breakdown, please comment or trackback. This is all about trying to help end users better understand this somewhat nebulous space.

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This blog represents my own personal views, and not those of my employer or any third party. Any use of the material in articles, whitepapers, blogs, etc. must be attributed to me alone without any reference to my employer. Use of my employers name is NOT authorized.