On 12 and 13 march 2008 the TechDays took place at ICC in Ghent. The second day I attended the architecture track on Software + Services (S+S). Eugenio Pace, who is working in the Software as a Service Architecture team at Microsoft, explained the anatomy of S+S applications and talked about his experiences in building (ISVs), running (hoster) and consuming S+S applications. He demonstrated LitwareHR, a sample S+S application with multi-tenant data access, extensible data model, multi-headed front-ends (web client, smart client and REST/SOAP APIs) and consumption of "services in the cloud" (Silverlight Streaming and SQL Server Data Services aka Sitka).
In my opinion, LitwareHR can be considered as a reference S+S application and Eugenio and his team will have to face different problems but it became clear to me that the whole approach in software architecture is just the beginning of a new era in IT. One of the main challenges will be to trust providers of "services in the cloud". For business critical applications, most companies want to control their applications themselves (on-premise) and as a result of that, they pay for it. Small and medium-sized companies rather would like to outsource things.
The team behind LitwareHR is experimenting with SQL Service Data Services (SSDS) for customization and multi-tenancy data in LitwareHR because SSDS has built-in support for extensibility and tenant isolation. I'm wondering if SSDS will be performant enough.
I was invited to join a round-table discussion with Eugenio Pace on S+S and he impressed me. Sometimes you get the impression that Microsoft is leveraging lots of stuff that we don't need in real-life business applications. When I talked to Eugenio I realized however that even companies which are not driven by technology can take advantage of "future" architectural approaches. As Eugenio told, programming languages, operating systems, technology changes constantly. Architecture and design patterns are more invariant. I certainly believe that the S+S approach will influence the way how applications will be designed in the future.
