Post a Comment On: Network of Things

There is a lot of discussion around SOA patterns now-a-days. If you have used patterns in your past life, these SOA patterns are not really the same thing. It is not a reusable chunk of code that you can cut & paste. These are big chunks of functionality that needs to be deployed at various points in your network. From an AON perspective, almost every pattern in SOA can become an independent appliance on the network.

When the first appliances hit the market in 1997 timeframe, the pattern they followed was Linux + some server. An AON appliance is a dual plane appliance which has XML for data plane and a control plane which depending upon the pattern that the AON appliance is implementing can be Java or a scripting language or anything else. The performance of course comes from the data plane.

So if we survey the SOA landscape today, we can easily find references to Gateway Pattern, Governance Pattern, Broker Pattern, Router Pattern etc. Each one of these can be made into an appliance in a service oriented network. The only difference between the appliances would be the control plane. You could deploy all these patterns into a collective which some folks call the ESB or you could drop-in appliances at various points in the network to achieve the same result.

Once you have the patterns deployed the challenge shifts to managing the multiple deployed patterns, plan for capacity, scale it and secure it etc. This is where a network based approach with appliances shows its clear advantage. Capacity planning, securing, scaling, sharing etc. are networking's forte.