SOA for the scorched

I tend to read a different set of blogs spanning from very close technology minded to more philosophical minded. Loosely Coupled Corner by Raghu Kodali is one of them and this blog has recently been about SOA. SOA is an abbreviation of "Service Oriented Architecture" but quite quickly renamed to "Same Old Architecture". If this infact was true, why has SOA come to life yet again then? And is SOA really "Same Old Architecture"?

Well - as Einstein so elegantly put it "every thing is relative" - and so is this. Relative to a systems architect which has been designing systems in many years using a internal SOA like design where a single system may be broken into "services", and relative to, lets say, a whole department which has a couple of systems they've "weaved" together to function as a unit, but is this really SOA?

I don't think so.. I think the reason why some renamed SOA to "Same Old Architecture", was because they didn't really understand why SOA emerged. True, from a technology only view, there wasn't much newsworthy to tell about, but going from a homogeneous architecture to a heterogeneous is something worth telling about. Imagine a system made out of different components (services), located at different locations on earth and weawed together to form this system (and each component may be used in alot of other systems aswell). So - why did SOA emerge? I think most companies have realized its both costly to build and maintain systems. So if they're able to buy a "service" from a third-party and include this into their own systems at a low cost, why shouldn't they!

I'm telling you - this is the way things are moving right now... :-)