Here is a brief interview with Werner Vogels on Amazon and SOA which has some important take aways particularly around designing for simplicity, maintaining customer focus, being business driven and technology agnosticism. Amazon has evolved from a single server, single database environment to a multi-server database platform serving millions of customers. Along the way they discovered that a service oriented architecture provided the flexibility and agility to support their business goals. Amazon didn’t attempt to retrofit a set of technologies or an architecture approach into their business they actually found that such an approach helped them to grow their business. To facilitate the magnitudes of scale and reliability they moved from a centralized mainframe platform to a one built on distributed components. Nothing new but always nice to heat about the practicality of SOA solving real world problems.
Nothing new, indeed. Except the strategy in Mr. Vogels definition: "Detailed advanced planning is nice, but your best bet is to just get out there and start doing it. And keep it simple -- very simple." Well, it may be not explicit words of Mr.Vogels but they are highlighted in the interview.
I have a simple question ( in the manner of simple Web Services promoted by Amazon): if one has not done "Detailed advanced planning", how do you know that you are in SOA development "out there"? Is it because you develop a Web Service or a service? According to coming OASIS SOA RM standard, all mentioned "service" words may be not enough to get into the SOA... Yes, that simple.
I really doubt that Amazon business is "very simple", at least, its movement from the Mainframe into distributed computing and recent offer for new services to small business do not seems quite simple. So, why implementation of its business services has to be "very simple"?
(No, I am not working for the Amazon.com)