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Post details: OSBC2007 SF Session 8

05/23/07

03:57:30 pm, Categories: Computers and Internet, Open Source, 842 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio

OSBC2007 SF Session 8

Open Source, SOA, and the Next-generation Data Center
Panel:

Akash Garg, hi5 Networks
Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource
Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2
Moderator: Michael Coté, RedMonk

What have the panel found what an SOA actually is?

Hi5 is a service to their end users, and not an enterprise SOA, so speed is key.

Mulesource thinks SOA is like a Unicorn, a beautiful idea not easily captured - OK, Travis, I want to see the cartoon of the Mule with a horn.

WSO2 sees that SOA allows the entire structure is internally service oriented, and allowing end users to aggregate needed data.

Customization and flexibility; open standards are even more important to SOA than open source; XML is a key standard, especially looking at social networks as a platform upon which folk can build.

WS*

Dave thinks trying to define something so complex is a morass, and that web services got somewhat out of control. Another interesting point is how Amazon, Google etc can publish web services allowing the world to work with them.

Sanjiva: WS* became a marketing tool for too many, but there is a core of about 15 documents.

Akash: For hi5, simple JASON, http, etc is enough.

From the buy side and the sales side, does it seem that customizing those 7-15% of WS* is a prime area for commercializing open source or is battling the closed source vendors where it's at.

Dave: if the point of SOA is to have things loosely coupled and use best of breed, going to the large stack vendor makes no sense. Start with Oracle Fusion, try to take one thing out, and it all falls apart.

Akash: agrees

Sanjiva: The community makes for the open source advantage.

One argument made against this is that the closed source vendors have 100s of trained QA folks. Dave is also seeing that sometimes the speed and volume of fixes and changes can be scary to the user.

Linux and Apache proved that the community works.

hi5 is not an open source project, but a site that uses a lot of open source and have found the community, such as PostgreSQL, to be very responsive.

Questions from the Audience

Scripting vs. Java?

Sanjiva: everything is in Java and C, and they are working with Zend for PHP binding, as well as ActiveX bindings. There is clearly a lot of interest in dynamic languages, and those communities have been underserved.

Dave likes the LAMP stack, but there may be questions of scale for Ruby, etc. Why not use Java and Spring? Java provides the scale. Mule supports PHP, PERL, etc. Build an app the right way - PERIOD.

Do you make a distinction between online businesses and more traditional enterprises?

The traditional enterprises often have legacy apps to worry about. The online businesses may have scaling issues.

Sanjiva has seen enterprise customers want REST and other lightweight services.

How will SOA and Virtualization work together to help enterprises support remote teams and distributed workgroups?

Akash: server farms, Akamai...

Dave: Everything is an endpoint, the whole goal of SOA is to allow things to work together. Companies do work through the cloud. Virtualization does bring a set of other problems for SOAs and how to work through the VM.

Sanjiva brings up Amazon EC2 and a customer of theirs that is working to unify virtualization and SOA. Virtualization naturally has a component of unification that works well with SOA.

Greenfield and Legacy; Cultural and Data Center Transformations

Dave has seen where SOA was the method to move from legacy to greenfield and this is one of the problems with WS* confusion. Silo'd information is a nightmare; and regardless of how implemented, the idea of stand-alone applications is dying.

Sanjiva: SOA as a technology platform is suitable to do what ActiveX, fuzzy beans, etc have tried with reuse. The only advantage that services has over these other technologies is the higher level of granularity forces more detailed thinking of the business.

Managing Services/SOA?

Dave - Mulesource built in MuleHQ but still not that easy yet.

Sanjiva - key part of making an SOA works

Akash - abstracting one layer up so that it is well understood how what they are monitoring affects the business; in many ways, hi5 is the next generation database, open source is core, SOA was home grown, which led to the question of what Mule and WSO2 are seeing: WSO2 small and on the web to large and internal; Mule sees that customers run different ESBs and multiple Mule instances, e.g. as H&R Block showed in yesterday's keynote, they have at peak tax season, 13,000 instances.

How would it work with ESB/SOA as a Service?

Dave: they're launching this later this year, but some things will always reside behind the firewall

Sanjiva: SaaS for middleware is definitely happening. But beware that SasS is another form of lock-in unless the identical software is available as open source. Discussion and debate ensued.

Coté changed the question a bit for Akash to outsourcing the data center. Who doesn't today? Rack or leased servers, etc.

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