Agree from a control standpoint, although I’m not sure where the internal configuration is more an illusion of control than the real thing. A very competent external configuration may give you better results.
My main musings are whether expending resources for an internal ESB and for a cloud solution is double spending or are there situations where there is added value. What does it mean to have one group putting in an ESB and another group concurrently talking to moving everything to the cloud? There are tradeoffs to be made, but in which situations does having concurrent, interacting ESB and cloud solutions make sense? Has anyone asked this question before? Who would we ask it to and get an unbiased (at least minimally biased) answer?
Ken
There are many cases like this. Nevertheless, an ESB in the company is by definition your property under the full control of yours. The same ESB in the cloud is on the foreign territory and in spite of contracts you have to deal with it as with an external company: if your contract is smart and you have an on-demand control over the ESB, in a case of any problems you have to deal with an extra node in the command chain, which can screw you totally. For example, when an internal ESB support person is going for vacations, you define the deputy (temporary replacement); when this case takes place in the external company, you never can be sure that your Cloud ESB is under proper support at any moment. As a small help here, you can require the DR of your Cloud provider would fully cover your DR requirements.
- Michael
How about if the ESB vendor also becomes a cloud provider and has its ESB services running in the cloud?
Anything else come to mind?
Ken
How much logical synergy between doing your work in/by your company (via ESB) and by cooperation of external (not-controlled) Cloud-provider companies?
- Michael
My question isn’t whether you should to do things in-house or out-source. There is (and I expect always will be) plenty to debate.
What I really had in mind is that cloud services seem a replacement for an ESB. Now I could have an ESB in-house for things I do not want (trust?) to put in a cloud, but that is just splitting the problem and adding the complication of making the ESB and cloud pieces work together (unless we can make the two pieces nearly independent of each other).
Is there any logical synergy in ESB and cloud use?
Ken
I don't think that the ESB is mission-critical to a company any more than any other "commodity" IT service component that does not constitute the core and proprietary business knowledge, expertise and data of the company.
Sure, an external (or internal) ESB total failure can take down the business for a while. So can a wide electrical or Internet outage, flood, fire, etc. Companies cannot and do not totally insulate themselves from all external dependencies. Moreover, unless you are responsible for managing a disaster (FEMA) the losses the business faces from widespread outages are mitigated in part by the fact that partners and customers are also likely affected and therefore even if your company is up and running, there's not a lot of business to be done. (My big takeaway from Y2K.)
As for the fact that AWS and other Cloud providers have outages: sure, but the relevant standard is not perfection but performance relative to alternatives. My impression is that Cloud providers, at least the leading ones, measure up well by that standard.
Martin
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