

Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell   - nickb
http://thewaronbullshit.com/2007/08/30/soa/

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wwhchung
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.

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arasakik
While the article makes some interesting points about the perceived flaws of
SOA, I'm not sure that I agree that they are specific to SOA itself. Perhaps
some of them only apply depending on the context of the situation.

His first point with respect to the up-front design needed for service
interfaces - how is this any different when creating any public API that other
services will consume? This is a challenge for any public interface. If the
interface needs to change, mark the relevant sections as deprecated.

The second point with respect to strange dependencies - this could certainly
be a problem with disparate services spread across many organizations. Again,
I'm not certain that this issue is specific to SOA - it sounds like the author
is pointing out that finding relevant documentation about service dependencies
is the flaw here. Again, I'd like to point out that this is a challenge for
any project calling on other code - documentation could be distributed across
many different open source libraries, etc.

SOA definitely has its benefits. Companies such as Amazon.com have scaled
successfully because of their Service Oriented Architecture, before it became
a buzzword.

The author is correct, though, in stating that a lot of the buzz around SOA is
bullshit. This is typical of any method/solution that receives a lot of hype.
For example: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-
agile...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-
agile_27.html)

