Rourke McNamara

David Linthicum recently wrote a great piece on designing for performance in SOA-based development environments. It’s good to see an influential SOA blogger talking about performance; there’s far too little talk about performance among analysts and thought leader. Performance and scalability are extremely important, and if you don’t consider them from the beginning and design for performance you will pay for it later.

In traditional application development, architects could get away with ignoring performance concerns when the application in question had very minor load and latency requirements. In the world of SOA this isn’t an option. The service you write today for a low load application will be re-used tomorrow in a high load environment.

Yesterday Matt Quinn of TIBCO Software, Inc. talked about Service Virtualization at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services conference in Orlando. Matt started his presentation by saying that Service Virtualization is:

Functionality designed to reduce complexity of communication, location and control as service networks increase in size.

Service Virtualization, a key feature of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid, is a technology meant to help companies deal with the complexity that comes with doing large-scale heterogeneous SOA. Period. Matt spent some time at the beginning introducing some of the problems companies with large service networks are beginning to face, including communications management and service scaling challenges. Matt then talked about how TIBCO’s approach to Service Virtualization helps to solve these problems.