SOA Network

The article discusses the requirements for the underlying network for SOA to function according to it's claims. While the author has mostly borrowed from existing white papers, there are a few nuggets of gold in there. Here are my thoughts on a few points the author made.

...."An SOA is a business process-driven application integration architecture in which all functions, activities and actions are defined as services and use standards-based interfaces."

This gets to the core of what a SOA network is all about. Business processes are driven by events and the SOA network likewise has to be driven by events and not just traffic patterns and traffic engineering as is today's network. Pub/Sub event distribution model is more suitable for a small installation but for any size of installation worthy of the name "network", this model is not totally not suitable.

The missing link in today's network's readines for SOA is scalable event propagation to entities on the network and the ability to resolve among those entities. Once this is done, the bit about securely and reliably sending messages is straight forward processing and thanks for web service enabled standards, quite interoperable.

.... "But in the end, the SOA's business benefits will outweigh the cost of implementation. "

Amen to that.

Application Networks

The PSTN is the world largest network dedicated to one application i.e. telephony. It works really well, has great QoS and costs a few cents/minute. It has a great business model that supports around $800B dollar industry and employs a few million people around the world.

Look at another network the internet. Supports millions of applications none of which have any QoS, costs a bundle, Does not have a business model that works and employs well in tens of thousands.

Is something wrong here?