The World of SOA and EDA

Couple of weeks ago, I got this wonderful opportunity to pick the brain of Ian Robertson, Director of Architecture, from Overstock.com. When asked about the 'SOA is dead' controversy, he brushed it aside confirming that SOA was indeed alive and kicking at Overstock.com. Overstock.com has done a phenomenal job of building a SOA-based enterprise where both IT and Business are working towards the singular goal of growing business, he added. The pragmatic approach of the IT architecture team towards solving business problems and staying away from ivory tower architectures has remained a key ingredient of its success. It is also important to not get too caught up in a single project/problem to lose sight of and jeopardize the long term goals of the business.

When I wanted to hear his thoughts on the REST vs. SOAP discussion, he said "All of Overstock.com's services within its firewall are REST-based; we don't use SOAP for our intra-firewall invocations. Our 3rd party partners, however, use a mix of SOAP and HTTPS protocols to access our public services. By using REST for our internal services, we are avoiding some of the overhead that the WS-* standards introduce."

IMHO, SOAP adds value when invocations are business critical where security, encryption, and reliability are of utmost importance – imagine the consequences of losing a $1M dollar PO. Other GET or POST type of interactions that are not business critical simply cannot justify the overhead that SOAP introduces and it is better to stick to REST to stay lean and mean. SOAP does have its own place, albeit in a reduced role.

Interestingly it was only earlier today that Dan Woods (JargonSpy of Forbes.com) touched upon the same topic of REST Vs. SOAP in his ‘A Simpler Path to SOA’ article. I agree with Ian, Dan, and Accenture CTO Don Rippert that it is time to give SOAP some REST. In fact, SOA itself has been consistently delivering on its promises through some serious heavy lifting (read SOAP) over the past few years and it certainly deserves an ease-off with a nice REST-ful, SOAP-y bubble bath.

BTW, I really enjoyed Ian's contributions at the "The Role of the Architect Roundtable" at ComputerWorld's Enterprise Architecture Virtual Conference. I would highly recommend it to anyone working in the today’s world of enterprise IT.

UPDATE: In my later blog post, SOAP or REST? it's about your priorities, I have discussed some of the implications of having a hybrid approach, and some of the important considerations while making these decisions.