The article's statements on the problems with SOA don't accurately reflect reality. For example, "SOA requires you to do a whole load of up-front design and sp

The article's statements on the problems with SOA don't accurately reflect reality. For example, "SOA requires you to do a whole load of up-front design and specification that's very difficult to change after." This is not a problem with SOA, rather than a symptom of poor change management, which can occur in any code base whether you are using SOA or not. Similarly, his "strange loops" issue is really an issue of poor dependency management/mapping. You can easily write a program that exhibits the same problems. One valid issue with SOA is data consistency. Dealing with data consistency across services is a real problem, and this may contribute to extra development time. But by no means does this indicate that SOA is the opposite of agile. There are agile development benefits in SOA, and I don't feel that the drawbacks outweigh these benefits.