Am I becoming an old integration cynic (or a Happy Camper as @mikaelsand so sarcastically called me a couple of weeks ago during an #IntegrationMonday)? I don’t think so, but correct me if I’m wrong, please!
My current view on the latest Microservices platform craze is the following: Old wine in new bottles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can now run on the latest SQL Server (but not SQL Azure and not AlwaysOn) and run things in different containers. And we have the 3rd or 4th incarnation of a business rules composer that does exactly the same but in a new frame. And yet another way of composing services and building transformations. And we store and exchange things using JSON. Great! 😉 But to me, this all still falls in the category “platform alignment” or “platform modernization”. This is not innovation. This is not adding great features that help our customers solve real life issues in a much better way. This is like adding airbags and anti-lock brakes (that any car has today), but not building a car that’s 60% software and really innovative (like Tesla). This is just making sure that you use the latest technologies to be able to run your basic functions, but even these are not providing the bare minimum.
We are still not fixing what we really crave for: end-to-end design- and runtime governance. And better productivity. But that’s a couple more bridges too far right now. I know that governance is a boring word. But I also know that my customers desperately need it. How else can you manage and monitor your more and more complex integration architecture? When only running on-prem integration, it’s relatively easy. But we lack the real tools here already. We need 3rd party tools to manage and monitor our environment. When adding SaaS, Mobile Apps and IoT to the mix, it becomes more and more complex. Let alone when adding Microservices.
My customers want the following. Today!
- An easy way to register and find services
- An easy way to compose services (aligned with business processes)
- A proper way to handle configuration management and deploy & manage those services (and really understand what’s deployed)
- Real end-to-end insight in composed services, including root cause analysis
For enterprises that have a “Microsoft unless” policy, today it’s impossible to use only Microsoft technology for integration purposes. They need 3rd party tools for management and monitoring. Tools that only solve part of the design-time and part of the run-time governance issues we have. Tools that can’t be used end-to-end. Tools that are built by companies we don’t know will still exist in 2 years time. Tools that are not Microsoft tools. Tools of which we even need more than one to provide for end-to-end, fully manageable services.
When, for example, my on-prem BizTalk Server exposes a back-end SOAP or other legacy service as an externally faced REST service (this is called mediation) we can more or less manage and monitor that. In a quite limited way still, because there is no real repository that can register my SOAP and REST services for solution developers to be able to find and start using them. And BAM needs quite some config. But, the major problem is that as soon as the REST service is consumed by API Management which exposes it to Apps and Portals and other consumers, we have no way to find out what happens anymore; no end-to-end tracking & tracing is possible. Unless we built it ourselves. By coding. Yes, you heard me: Coding; a 20th century concept of building software solutions. So 5 minutes ago!
What we need is platform development (by any vendor by the way, including IBM, SAP, Google, etc.) that takes supportability first seriously. This means: first think about how your customers are going to be able to manage & monitor this when going in production before you start building features. Really cater for management & monitoring. Not build software that cannot or only poorly be managed and monitored. And once we have that, we’ll be more than happy to get better design and development productivity as well. But for now, being able to get rid of the bulk of the cost of any integration environment, namely supporting it on a day-to-day basis (the part of the iceberg that’s under water), would be a good starter indeed.
Thanks for listening. Please spread the word. 🙂
Cheers, Gijs
p.s. I think Microsoft are still way ahead of most other vendors. Pure-play integration vendors don’t have a bright future. It’s a platform game.
indaField 