The Fractal Nature of Web Services

Conventional wisdom holds that the service-oriented architecture approach is the silver bullet for all IT problems nowadays. According to this view, SOA leads to near-perfect applications in which every function is implemented as a service, and a service can call any other service to implement its functionality. This includes not only services that provide business functionality, but also nonfunctional services for logging, monitoring, data transformation, and so on. Services that exist as independent concepts at design time are implemented as independent execution entities at runtime. Assuming that the conceptual system structure is equally useful during execution is a naive and potentially dangerous mistake. Instead, applying high-performance transaction system design criteria that optimize for runtime properties like performance, throughput, and resiliency should be paramount