SoA Gods Kitchen

A colleague at work, Adam Philips produced a great picture concept for the description of SOA based on earlier work entitled “SOA Beef Bourguignon”.

I love the slide, its one of the best SOA slides I've seen in a long while, I can relate to that cook with the rolling pin! the use of the pictures to convey the concept of the tiers is very good.  Strictly the abstraction of logic and infrastructure does have more layers, the ingredients would include the hardware: servers, networks, storage, security etc so you could add another cylinder on the bottom called "Infrastructure" and add a pic like kitchen utensils...   you also can show the multiple form factors that can consume services such as a Mobile, laptop, netbook, mainframe terminal etc at the top of the picture.

This picture can be further enhanced with  SOA Governance and organisation and in particular the concept of an Service Inventory (Thomas Erl has this as a key feature of the SOA world.  see www.soapatterns.org   or  www.soapatterns.com  the latter has podcasts you can listen to.)  The analogy here is that it is the "Kitchen" in which the SOA environment / Ecosystem would exist.   The basic difference is that we need to build a logical Service contract library in design time and the run time expression of this is typically in a traditional SOA  the Registry and repository (can be multiple).  SOA does not need these strictly to work as you can still do loose coupling as with WOA  and REST and still recognise this as a SOA concept albeit a light weight implementation of it.

The title god’s kitchen is in reference to the trance music that has the same name sake and the myriad of music and many blended mixes that constantly remind me of variation.  This made me  recall an earlier YouTube SOA “hit” which used the concept of music orchestration in SOA and now we see new music, new orchestration and new kitchens emerging in the clouds.