We found and article today by By Sajeev Nair, program director & head, Internet & emerging technologies practice, Mindtree, that in essence stated that it is time for federation of ESBs.
“In a federated ESB, there is one “master” ESB to which several “dependent” ESBs are connected, which forms a single federated logical domain. The master ESB acts as a single point of contact for the service consumers (external to the organization). The service consumer can make requests to any business unit in an enterprise via the master ESB. It also hosts the services for governance, security and management. The master ESB can have its own repository, helping in co-ordination of dependent ESBs via routing rules stored in central management.”
Brandon and I have long been proponents of a federated approach to SOA. In that, after all SOA is about disparate systems working together based on interoperability standards not about betting the farm on a single vendor. We do however use the term hierarchical ESBs as opposed to federated and intermediary over ESB, but the premise remains the same.
It may (or may not) come as a surprise that we get quite a bit of pushback when we say we don’t really care how many ESBs (Intermediaries) you have in your enterprise so long as they meet your SOA reference architecture guidelines. In fact, in our engagements we encourage enterprises to select several SOA vendors for their pilot efforts, in addition to any they may already have in house, to better illuminate how vendors apply industry best practices.
So my question to our loyal readers, would you be interested in a few posts on why SOA is not about a single vendor and/or how we go about conducting vendor evaluations to ferret out bad or potentially troubling SOA implementations?
Print This Post
Are you taking requests on topics? Is that how I read it?
I’m a big fan for federation of data (and capabilities); as you both know. Taking the hard-line on enterprise architecture and trying to be one source to rule them all has never (ever) been successful. I think at this point it’s time for a real (or fake) sample. Thrown in some drawings, some instances of consuming and providing services from multiple vendors, and why that is a good thing.
Yes, we are always happy to take suggestions! Bill and I continually brainstorm ways to share our knowledge without giving away the “secret sauce”. Give us a week or two and I’m sure we can come up with a scenario (with visuals) that further demonstrates are points thus far. Thanks for the suggestion John!