Every where you go in the land of enterprise computing these days, just about everybody is talking about virtualization. But the question that is starting to be asked in some quarters is whether we're missing the point by focusing so much on hardware when the real benefits of virtualization are to be derived from changing the way we think about building and running applications.
That's the question at least being posed by John Michelsen, founder and chief architect for iTKO, a company that makes a testing environment, called LISA, for applications built on top of a service-oriented architecture. Michelsen's point is that going forward developers need to combine the concepts of virtualization with SOA to provide the level of flexibility that business today is demanding from its enterprise applications.
To that end, Michelsen says that if developers essentially created a virtual version of all the end points trying to access their applications on the server, then all they would ever need to provide a user of the application is a URL to access it. This has a number of implications because it means that that specific service being called could be running on any server in the world at any time of day. Customers could also upgrade those services more easily while providing virtual access to the service while the new version of the service is being developed because they would never need to physically upgrade the end point.
Furthermore, Michelsen argues that development environments such as LISA can now leverage virtualization to help simplify all the development of SOA applications. The thing that slows down the development of these applications is all the interdependencies of the services. When one service is upgraded it has the potential to have downstream effects on any number of services. What Michelsen is saying is that developers can create a virtual model that captures all the behavior of the services so they can fully test the impact that any change to a service is going to have on the rest of the environment without having to test it on a live production environment first.
What Michelsen is trying to make clear is that virtualization, when applied to application development, creates a unique opportunity for developers to couple parts of their SOA applications more loosely compared to the all the hard-coded interdependencies that frequently bog down development today. This could be an approach that unclogs a lot of the logjam that exists around SOA development today, which in turn would accelerate the adoption of cloud computing models in the enterprise that are pretty much dependent on the existence of applications that expose themselves as services.
SOA has been one of those overnight success stories that has been more than 10 years in the making. For the most part, we're stuck trying to figure out how to manage all the complex interdependencies that make up these types of applications, so maybe the time has finally arrived to look outside of traditional application development circles to borrow some concepts from the hardware folks so we can finally jumpstart application development using SOA once again.