EnjoyTech

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new orchestration service called Simple Workflow Service . I would encourage you to read the announcement on Werner's blog  where he explains the need, rationale, and architecture. The people I spoke to had mixed reactions. One set of people described this as a great idea and were excited that the developers can now focus on writing domain-specific code as opposed to writing plumbing code to orchestrate their actual code. The other set of people felt that this service creates a new cloud lock-in making it difficult for the developers to switch from one cloud to another as well as being able to interoperate at the orchestration level. I believe this is a brilliant idea for a variety of reasons. Orchestration has always been painful. Ask the developers who have been involved in managing task execution across a cluster that required them to code for load balancing, handling exceptions, restarting hung processes, tracking progress etc. This is not a core c...

Lately I have observed significant movement in two transformational trends - adoption of REST over SOAP and proliferation of non-relational persistence options. These two trends complement each other and they are likely to cause disruption sooner than later. The enterprise software that required complex transactions, monitoring, and orchestration capabilities relied on the SOAP-based architecture and standards to realize their SOA efforts. The consumer web on the other side raced towards embracing RESTful interfaces since they were simple to set up and consume. There are arguments on both the sides. However, lately the market forces have taken the side of REST even if REST has significant drawbacks in the areas such as security and transactions. This once again proves that a simple and good enough approach that conforms to loose contracts outweighs a complex solution that complies to stricter standards even if it means compromising certain critical features. The web is essentially an u...