SOA / ESB Dilemma

Question

Sorry for the very involved question, but this is something I've been researching for a while now and it is really frustrating me. I feel like in today's age we have a million and one ways to implement services tat are cross-platform (SOAP) and easy to build (thanks to .NET, java, and other frameworks). However, these technologies have been in the community for 5-10 years, but we are (or at least I am) constantly plagued with the same issues:

1. Identification (Tracking services) - UDDI; e.g., had to remind a co-worker the 3 times this month where a service is at, despite the fact there is a wiki that discusses the service and a PDF version of the same documentation that lives in a repository where we keep our service docs.
2. Scalability - Out of the box clustering; As organizations, we spend a lot of money on paying our admins just to watch the utilization of our services and make decisions like, does this service need more RAM, more CPU, more interfaces? How do I load balance this?
3. Monitoring - error logging, etc; I can't count how many times I have to set up tracing on services in order to see why a bug is happening that only seems to affect one customer, or have to code logic into the service to serialize exceptions, log exceptions to dbs, fail gracefully, etc.
4. Deployment - easy to deploy; none of this deploying DLLs to 5 load balanced servers

Each one of these problems requires some type of custom solution implemented by the organization. Documentation and UDDIs for #1. Virtualization and load balancing hardware / software for #2. Tracing, writing exceptions to databases / logs, etc for #3. Custom deployment software for #4. I work for a mid-sized organization. I can't even imagine how a company the size of Sun, Google, or Microsoft would tackle these dilemmas.

Maybe my vision is unrealistic, but I dream of having a Framework per se that lives on top of a server cluster that manages all of the above. I was ecstatic to read about Microsoft's AppFabric since it really seems to extend some of the functionality of BizTalk to WCF service implementors: Caching, Hosting, Monitoring, etc. However, from what I've seen, I still don't feel it lives up to my dream for an all-in-one solution that assists the developer and organization in writing services that are scaled across clusters easily, deployed into the cluster easily, and identifiable, possibly even version-able.

So, I don't mean this post to be about my dream. I do actually have a question. For starters, is my dream / want completely unrealistic? Furthermore, what solutions are there available that attempt to solve these problems without confining us to a new and more proprietary way (BizTalk) of developing services? An lastly, in concern to a complete SOA / ESB solution, where do we see the most potential in the market right now or in the future?

Answer 1

Here's my two cents.

I've been a developer at a company that used SOA incorrectly. The worst solution they implemented was field level validation of form elements on a desktop app using SOA. To perform acceptably these require very low latency. A 2-4 second wait to change to a new field gets old fast. The service ran over the network on a biztalk server. Everyone hated it.

If you're going to do this you really need to spend a lot of time dealing with network latency, service failure, timing, and timeout issues.

Don't get carried away and think SOA is the solution to every problem. Used at a high level it's great, used at a low level it makes your applications fragile, slow, and impossible to debug.

Answer 2

I think that you are talking about different kinds of problems here.

1). Developers who don't read documentation. This is an endemic problem, not limited to SOA - just look at some questions on StackOverflow. At least the developer is asking you whether there is a service, rather then just duplicating logic in their own code. I don't see any technical solution to these kinds of problems, you've already provided good registries and documentation, but some developers prefer to talk to people. Maybe, even, this is actually a good thing - human interaction has value above the technical content of the interaction. Or maybe, you're too nice: "No, I won't answer that question, look it up."

2). Scaling. There are technologies addressing this issue. (Disclaimer I work for IBM, who sell some, so I'll reference these - I'm not intending to imply that IBM are the only vendor with solutions in this space.) There are products such as this that can provision a new machine, install a software stack and add it to a cluster to address workload changes. Then at a finer grained level of control in the JEE world the Application Server can dynamically shape traffic and adjust clusters. See WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

3). Monitoring. I don't "get" what you expect here. In all likelyhood such tricky bugs will require application level trace. For some problems such as finding memory leaks and performance bottlenecks there are very good tools, at least in the JEE world.

4). I can't speak to the .Net world, but I'd say that JEE app servers do a reasonable job of deploying the apps across clusters smoothly, and in the cases where we use JNI and need DLLs deploying then we can use products such as the Tivoli stack I mention to manage this.

So, in summary, I do think that vendors are trying to address these issues. And I don't think your life would be simpler without SOA. Imagine instead the same problems applied to myriad separate, independent applications.