Lately, there's been an increasing amount of discussion around the delta between SOA and virtualization. Todd Biske (MomentumSI) talks about this growing convergence in one of his latest "Outside the Box" posts, observing that "SOA creates a need for more efficient resource allocation," which is the goal of virtualization as well.
In the good old days, when everything could be plopped on a single systems, such as a mainframe, "a wily mainframe operator can do quite a bit to make sure that everything still manages to get done within the processing window," Todd said. With SOA and its increased interdependencies between systems and real time processing, "if we don’t give the operational staff the tools they need to efficiently manage those resources, we’ll be in an even bigger mess. Virtualization is one tool in that chest."
Speaking of the delta between virtualization and SOA, Delta Airlines appears to be taking the virtualization route to move its customer management systems to SOA. ComputerWorld reports that Delta Air Lines has launched to replace its core IT backbone with a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Delta's IT subsidiary, Delta Technology Inc., is charged with updating the "Delta Nervous System," which the article describes as "an IT backbone used to route messages among multiple systems," managing everything from tracking passenger check-ins and boarding to the SkyMiles frequent-flier program.
Rawls Whittlesey, Delta Technology’s chief architect and director of enterprise architecture and middleware frameworks, is quoted as saying that Delta will be replacing its Tuxedo middleware from BEA Systems with standards-based SOA technology.
The airline's IT operation will port more than 100 Java, C++ and .NET services written with Tuxedo to TIBCO's ActiveMatrix platform, which the vendor launched last week. According to TIBCO, Active Matrix employs a "service container approach" to essentially function as an SOA virtualization platform.
The service virtualization will help reduce application configuration requirements, Whittelsey said. “You want to try to insulate the applications from having to know what server they are on and what environment they are in,” and by using virtualization, “the application teams don’t have to know where a service lives."
Service virtualization solves both problems. I wrote a post taking the mainframe analogy a step further and explaining how service virtualization addresses the scaling problem.