For the longest time, I’ve felt that a component-based approach to operations and OSS is essential for re-use, flexibility, agility, cost reduction, and maintenance simplification. I also think that micro-services, SOA and Orchestration are either the same thing, or aspects of the same design philosophy. Consequently I use a fairly simple term “component based” because there are so many buzzwords that seem to carry lots of baggage – both good and bad. Clearly, “micro-services” are in vogue. Yet services, as in “services oriented architecture (SOA)” can be useful whether they are “macro” or “micro”. Micro-services provide more granularity, and macro-services more simplicity – it’s a trade-off. Many of these can be exposed via an API. It’s very common to implement a SOA using internal APIs, and they are practically essential for external APIs. We can (and I do) think of digital services and digital collaboration as cross-company or cross-industry SOA. The ARG report “The Rise of Digital Ecosystems” goes into great depth on both the market evolution/needs of digital ecosystems, and the software capabilities and architecture needed to implement advanced commercial relationships and complex products/services. Orchestration is the latest buzzword associated with fulfillment logic. Somehow, “orchestration” is considered new and […]