Long live SOA in the cloud era [Video]

SOA’s dictum that ‘everything is a service’ is more relevant than ever

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A few years back, SOA (service-oriented architecture) was all the rage. Vendors rushed to remarket everything as SOA, and SOA-washing was the new greenwashing. But in today’s rush to the cloud, have we abandoned SOA? If so, we’re in trouble.

I was late to SOA. When Bobby Woolf sent me an early copy of “Enterprise Integration Patterns,” I didn’t get it. I had been working on performance and scalability rather than integration. A few years later, after JBoss was sold to Red Hat, we had one final blowout company party. I was standing amid some of the brightest minds in the industry when someone asked, “What the heck is SOA?” No one could answer except the marketing guy.

SOA isn’t a product. It isn’t even an architecture. It is a strategy or maybe even a philosophy. The short version is, as …