One of the thoughts I gathered from last night's panel on the possible death of SOA, pertains to the natural consequence of the push back on the WS-DeathStar and the spike of interest in the REST architecture.
So what is the consequence of dropping the dream of web-level distributed transactions and beyond-the-firewall data consistency?
Except for Juval Löwy (who I guess was playing devil's advocate with a mischievous wit), the panelists were unanimous on the need to create systems that handle failures gracefully, can self-heal and achieve eventual consistency.
David Platt said it very clearly: we need to design systems so they handle failures gracefully at each level of their architecture. Michele Leroux Bustamante added that this obviously does not remove the need for reliable storage (or messaging) at some point, but never beyond the firewall.
They presented these concepts with a baffling unabashed attitude, which I immensely appreciated. There is nothing more liberating than thought leaders debunking FUD.
