Mainstreaming SOA?
02/09/2009 04:22 PMYet another BizTalk vs. "Dublin" post. Just some stream of consciousness after last year's PDC announcements and issues covered in recent SOA and Business Process event at Redmond. I'm still having a bit mixed feelings but decided to write some of them down.
Microsoft is definitely going for more broader SOA portfolio with WCF, WF, BizTalk Server, "Dublin", “Oslo” and Azure cloud services. Enterprise architecture, governance and process management have been underlined many times within the past couple of months. No doubt of course these all are and have been important things all the time and should be paid a lot of attention in any organization. But as the set of SOA patterns, tools and products in the Microsoft world expands the relevance of architectural aspects multiplies as well. You need to have the right guys who know which part of solution stack is most efficiently implemented by which technologies and tools. And don’t forget the solution life cycle issues after deployment because there will be the constant requirement to improve and enhance whatever has been achieved earlier.
For me one of the most debated and interesting pieces is the relation between BizTalk Server and forthcoming Dublin/Windows Application Server. I'd like to share some of my thoughts about it and if you have any comments and opinions please just post them here. At first I've heard too many times that BizTalk Server is not going to be affected by Dublin. I kind of believe it and then again not. BizTalk Server still is going to be the packaged integration product for enterprises - when there's a need for reliable large scale pub-sub messaging, business activity monitoring and adapters it will be the choice to choose. BizTalk has been out for several years and has been proven in large scale deployments.
Then again BizTalk Server is based on older technology stack and if or when there is a need for capability that will exist in .NET Framework 4.0 (with WCF/WF) - like declarative composite processes - you need to tweak it - or use Dublin. It's been published that BizTalk is going to have somewhat steady two year release cycle so we'd expect next release out at about 2011. I haven't seen any facts for BizTalk roadmap - just the old feature backlog that's been out for a long time now and some rumors about Dublin-BizTalk interoperability. In the other hand let's be realistic also. There's no Dublin publicly available and will not be for at least a year from now. And when the first version ships how mature it is and is the mainstream market ready to adopt it fresh from production line. But nothing is more fun than speculating.
Dublin is going to ship with the server platform without any additional costs. But in the end it's going to be a set tools and add-ons into IIS7/WAS (Windows Process Activation Services). Though Dublin will contain some overlapping features with BizTalk Server it will not be as packaged product like BizTalk. It's just a place to host WCF/WF applications with built in features for scalability, basic management, monitoring and diagnostics tools. For most cases these might be enough but a tricky part is when it isn't anymore. If initially we choose Dublin as a tool to host our integration processes are we ever going to bring BizTalk into the picture?
Let's take an example: medium sized organization with quite simple business process integration requirements. No need for additional investments so we'll choose Dublin to host processes and services implemented with WCF/WF. Then business blooms and through organic growth and some acquisitions existing SOA and BP infra bloats within the organization and across business units. Even if from objective standpoint there's definite place for BizTalk I would argue that it's much easier to stick with the technologies that already are familiar and in production. And does adding BizTalk to this kind of scenario add much value after all? It needs a different skill set than WCF/WF development and majority of the features that it provides are in Dublin or can be used from framework even though tools/patterns tend to be more developer centric.
At this point I'm not going to place my bets for either way. No matter do you prefer BizTalk or are eagerly waiting for newer technologies it's a no brainer why Microsoft is pushing the importance of architectural aspects.
Microsoft is definitely going for more broader SOA portfolio with WCF, WF, BizTalk Server, "Dublin", “Oslo” and Azure cloud services. Enterprise architecture, governance and process management have been underlined many times within the past couple of months. No doubt of course these all are and have been important things all the time and should be paid a lot of attention in any organization. But as the set of SOA patterns, tools and products in the Microsoft world expands the relevance of architectural aspects multiplies as well. You need to have the right guys who know which part of solution stack is most efficiently implemented by which technologies and tools. And don’t forget the solution life cycle issues after deployment because there will be the constant requirement to improve and enhance whatever has been achieved earlier.
For me one of the most debated and interesting pieces is the relation between BizTalk Server and forthcoming Dublin/Windows Application Server. I'd like to share some of my thoughts about it and if you have any comments and opinions please just post them here. At first I've heard too many times that BizTalk Server is not going to be affected by Dublin. I kind of believe it and then again not. BizTalk Server still is going to be the packaged integration product for enterprises - when there's a need for reliable large scale pub-sub messaging, business activity monitoring and adapters it will be the choice to choose. BizTalk has been out for several years and has been proven in large scale deployments.
Then again BizTalk Server is based on older technology stack and if or when there is a need for capability that will exist in .NET Framework 4.0 (with WCF/WF) - like declarative composite processes - you need to tweak it - or use Dublin. It's been published that BizTalk is going to have somewhat steady two year release cycle so we'd expect next release out at about 2011. I haven't seen any facts for BizTalk roadmap - just the old feature backlog that's been out for a long time now and some rumors about Dublin-BizTalk interoperability. In the other hand let's be realistic also. There's no Dublin publicly available and will not be for at least a year from now. And when the first version ships how mature it is and is the mainstream market ready to adopt it fresh from production line. But nothing is more fun than speculating.
Dublin is going to ship with the server platform without any additional costs. But in the end it's going to be a set tools and add-ons into IIS7/WAS (Windows Process Activation Services). Though Dublin will contain some overlapping features with BizTalk Server it will not be as packaged product like BizTalk. It's just a place to host WCF/WF applications with built in features for scalability, basic management, monitoring and diagnostics tools. For most cases these might be enough but a tricky part is when it isn't anymore. If initially we choose Dublin as a tool to host our integration processes are we ever going to bring BizTalk into the picture?
Let's take an example: medium sized organization with quite simple business process integration requirements. No need for additional investments so we'll choose Dublin to host processes and services implemented with WCF/WF. Then business blooms and through organic growth and some acquisitions existing SOA and BP infra bloats within the organization and across business units. Even if from objective standpoint there's definite place for BizTalk I would argue that it's much easier to stick with the technologies that already are familiar and in production. And does adding BizTalk to this kind of scenario add much value after all? It needs a different skill set than WCF/WF development and majority of the features that it provides are in Dublin or can be used from framework even though tools/patterns tend to be more developer centric.
At this point I'm not going to place my bets for either way. No matter do you prefer BizTalk or are eagerly waiting for newer technologies it's a no brainer why Microsoft is pushing the importance of architectural aspects.
