6 ms·

SOA and the Tar Pit of Irrelevancy (2009)

47 points by geezerjay 8y ago

human20190310 8y ago
The essential quote is toward the end: "The term SOA has been so co-opted by vendors trying to sell stuff that I think it will die off as a term." I think it did! I definitely didn't remember what it stood for. (The author does provide a definition, but it's on the 25th time he uses the acronym :) )
- wrs 8y ago
  The term is now “microservices”.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    "let's refactor these sql statements as a stateless microservice"... so we can service 500 users with between 10 and 100 requests a day.
- CalChris 8y ago
  SOA - service oriented architecture
- jaabe 8y ago
  Did it really die though? It seem to live on well enough in enterprise. Less popular now that Microservices are back in fashion, but still lurking around waiting for the pendulum to swing back in 2-8 years when we have had enough of microservices (again). At least we improve on the paradigms on each iteration. Maybe one day one day both of them will be good enough to let us swing toward something new.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > Less popular now that Microservices are back in fashion Other than the WSDL/BPEL nonsense, is there any difference between service-oriented architecture and microservices architecture?
currywurst 8y ago
Substitute SOA for Kubernetes et al and it reads perfectly well :)
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  Unlike soa products (websphere/logic) it actually has some real world utility
- RickJWagner 8y ago
  I spent quite a while with SOA, but I find Kubernetes a little different. To me, SOA is more about the implementation-- especially the old WSDL-driven part. But Kubernetes is more about infrastructure. The applications are written in different styles and different languages. K8S is more like a platform than anything else, to me.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Yeah. The basic idea is fine. (Don't write huge monolithic software blobs!) But the term was effectively coopted to be about a lot of specific heavyweight proprietary software and the heavyweight specs associated with them.
    - tannhaeuser 8y ago
      I'm not disagreeing but the reason SOA is more complex is that it does a whole lot more than "REST" microservices. It encompasses standardized protocols for transactions, faults, asynchronous services, auth, and more, in addition to payload typing and state. Such QoS dimensions aren't either considered in naive "REST" services at all, or at least not in upfront design (because waterfall sucks right?). Hence they're implemented for each service in an ad-hoc fashion, if at all. Implementing ad-hoc security in Docker containers (a technology proud of cutting ties with established ways of keeping eg OpenSSL lib up-to-date) in the "REST architectural style" (appealing to junior devs) and without transactions sure sounds like calling for trouble and acrueing technical debt like there's no tomorrow.
      - 8y ago
wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago
The bits about code vs doodleware hit hard for me. With a certain proprietary database that I did customer support for, the encouraged development path was doodleware. It was genuinely very nice if you were doing some toy project, but it quickly became unmanageable. The vendor was on their 2nd of (currently 3?) iterations of doodleware for this database, so the tooling for it was crap and would never get better as they would soon abandon it. I have done in-depth analysis and refactors of dozens of these doodleware objects purely with vim macros. Portable gVim was literally the only thing I could get on the customer supplied Windows laptop to do this job. Export (through a semi-manual hack) dozens/hundreds of 10k line XML files, build a vim macro, cry, cross my fingers that the manual hack to replace the doodleware objects would work, cross them again that the objects weren't irreparably damaged. Now I'm seeing doodleware on the rise in cloud platforms, making business process flows "easy". Connecting different services "effortlessly".
- marktangotango 8y ago
  Service oriented architecture is alive and well in the form of ESB (enterprise service bus) (camel, mule, spring integration are examples). They’re also xml hell imo, that typically hit all the bad parts of xml; xsl, xslt, versioning, the idiotic half support for namespacing. No, no, not bitter at all :)
fake-name 8y ago
Somehow they never even define "SOA". What? As far as I know, SOA means "safe operating area", and I have no idea how the hell this pertains to anything they're discussing. Google tells me SOA probably means "service oriented architecture" (or the "society of actuaries"), but geez.
- function_seven 8y ago
  Yeah, it is Service Oriented Architecture. The definition is written out in the final section of the linked page. These were originally separate blog posts, so I assume the author got some feedback on this and decided to spell it out finally.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Working on compilers, SOA to me means "Struct Of Arrays", which is a data layout format that is much more amenable to vector or GPU code than the "Array of Structs" representation that languages tend to guide you to implementing.
  - Chlorus 8y ago
    Thought this was going to be about Start-of-Authority records in DNS & was wondering it could possibly be irrelevant.
- tottenhm 8y ago
  > Somehow they never even define "SOA". What? "SOA" means "microservices for Gen X'ers". "Microservices" means "SOA for millenials". I don't know what Baby Boomers called it.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    > I don't know what Baby Boomers called it. CORBA
rofaaa 8y ago
Now basically make about $6,000-$8,000 a month online. It’s enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 10-13 hours a week from home. I was amazed how easy it was after I tried it…
phs318u 8y ago
Having pre-dated SOA, been heavily involved in implementing SOA, and then watched SOA die on the vine, the overriding lesson was that technologists too often focus on syntactic coupling and completely forget about semantic coupling (by far, the harder problem). For all it's highly proscribed, heavyweight, over-engineered approach, SOA could have succeeded if the focus of implementations been on the semantic coupling problem. Sadly, I see little evidence that the majority of the current crop of technologists have learned this lesson (irrespective of the technology choices). http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTheSOARoom.aspx http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTh...

47 points by geezerjay 8y ago

human20190310 8y ago

The essential quote is toward the end: "The term SOA has been so co-opted by vendors trying to sell stuff that I think it will die off as a term." I think it did! I definitely didn't remember what it stood for. (The author does provide a definition, but it's on the 25th time he uses the acronym :) )

wrs 8y ago
The term is now “microservices”.
- sgt101 8y ago
  "let's refactor these sql statements as a stateless microservice"... so we can service 500 users with between 10 and 100 requests a day.
CalChris 8y ago
SOA - service oriented architecture
jaabe 8y ago
Did it really die though? It seem to live on well enough in enterprise. Less popular now that Microservices are back in fashion, but still lurking around waiting for the pendulum to swing back in 2-8 years when we have had enough of microservices (again). At least we improve on the paradigms on each iteration. Maybe one day one day both of them will be good enough to let us swing toward something new.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > Less popular now that Microservices are back in fashion Other than the WSDL/BPEL nonsense, is there any difference between service-oriented architecture and microservices architecture?

currywurst 8y ago

Substitute SOA for Kubernetes et al and it reads perfectly well :)

dilyevsky 8y ago
Unlike soa products (websphere/logic) it actually has some real world utility
RickJWagner 8y ago
I spent quite a while with SOA, but I find Kubernetes a little different. To me, SOA is more about the implementation-- especially the old WSDL-driven part. But Kubernetes is more about infrastructure. The applications are written in different styles and different languages. K8S is more like a platform than anything else, to me.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Yeah. The basic idea is fine. (Don't write huge monolithic software blobs!) But the term was effectively coopted to be about a lot of specific heavyweight proprietary software and the heavyweight specs associated with them.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    I'm not disagreeing but the reason SOA is more complex is that it does a whole lot more than "REST" microservices. It encompasses standardized protocols for transactions, faults, asynchronous services, auth, and more, in addition to payload typing and state. Such QoS dimensions aren't either considered in naive "REST" services at all, or at least not in upfront design (because waterfall sucks right?). Hence they're implemented for each service in an ad-hoc fashion, if at all. Implementing ad-hoc security in Docker containers (a technology proud of cutting ties with established ways of keeping eg OpenSSL lib up-to-date) in the "REST architectural style" (appealing to junior devs) and without transactions sure sounds like calling for trouble and acrueing technical debt like there's no tomorrow.
    - 8y ago

wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago

The bits about code vs doodleware hit hard for me. With a certain proprietary database that I did customer support for, the encouraged development path was doodleware. It was genuinely very nice if you were doing some toy project, but it quickly became unmanageable. The vendor was on their 2nd of (currently 3?) iterations of doodleware for this database, so the tooling for it was crap and would never get better as they would soon abandon it. I have done in-depth analysis and refactors of dozens of these doodleware objects purely with vim macros. Portable gVim was literally the only thing I could get on the customer supplied Windows laptop to do this job. Export (through a semi-manual hack) dozens/hundreds of 10k line XML files, build a vim macro, cry, cross my fingers that the manual hack to replace the doodleware objects would work, cross them again that the objects weren't irreparably damaged. Now I'm seeing doodleware on the rise in cloud platforms, making business process flows "easy". Connecting different services "effortlessly".

marktangotango 8y ago
Service oriented architecture is alive and well in the form of ESB (enterprise service bus) (camel, mule, spring integration are examples). They’re also xml hell imo, that typically hit all the bad parts of xml; xsl, xslt, versioning, the idiotic half support for namespacing. No, no, not bitter at all :)

fake-name 8y ago

Somehow they never even define "SOA". What? As far as I know, SOA means "safe operating area", and I have no idea how the hell this pertains to anything they're discussing. Google tells me SOA probably means "service oriented architecture" (or the "society of actuaries"), but geez.

function_seven 8y ago
Yeah, it is Service Oriented Architecture. The definition is written out in the final section of the linked page. These were originally separate blog posts, so I assume the author got some feedback on this and decided to spell it out finally.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jcranmer 8y ago
Working on compilers, SOA to me means "Struct Of Arrays", which is a data layout format that is much more amenable to vector or GPU code than the "Array of Structs" representation that languages tend to guide you to implementing.
- Chlorus 8y ago
  Thought this was going to be about Start-of-Authority records in DNS & was wondering it could possibly be irrelevant.
tottenhm 8y ago
> Somehow they never even define "SOA". What? "SOA" means "microservices for Gen X'ers". "Microservices" means "SOA for millenials". I don't know what Baby Boomers called it.
- pstuart 8y ago
  > I don't know what Baby Boomers called it. CORBA

rofaaa 8y ago

Now basically make about $6,000-$8,000 a month online. It’s enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 10-13 hours a week from home. I was amazed how easy it was after I tried it…

phs318u 8y ago

Having pre-dated SOA, been heavily involved in implementing SOA, and then watched SOA die on the vine, the overriding lesson was that technologists too often focus on syntactic coupling and completely forget about semantic coupling (by far, the harder problem). For all it's highly proscribed, heavyweight, over-engineered approach, SOA could have succeeded if the focus of implementations been on the semantic coupling problem. Sadly, I see little evidence that the majority of the current crop of technologists have learned this lesson (irrespective of the technology choices). http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTheSOARoom.aspx http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTh...