Tutorials SOA DevelopmentAbout two months later, Elena was in her monthly meeting with Andrea. Andrea brought up the subject of service versioning. "I understand there was quite a bit of debate around how to accommodate the needs of the annuity department in the Customer Information Service."
Elena replied, "I wouldn't say that there was that much debate. Spencer facilitated a decision-making session, and I encouraged all of my team to put all of the options on the table, regardless of their viability. The real debate came down to whether or not Maria's team wanted to maintain two implementations of the service in production, or two versions of the service interface in production."
"That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about. Now that we have a number of services that have multiple consumers, changes to those services could really become a problem. Maria's example is probably just the first of many to come. While we handled this one, I don't think having a facilitated session for every service change is going to scale well."
"I agree. This is a situation that we really haven't had to deal with much in the past. When our focus was solely applications, it was always the same set of end users that wanted to see some changes made. There was never a need to deal with multiple versions."
"I'd like for you to take this to the SOA Center of Excellence and have them come up with some recommendations around service versioning. Let's get ahead of this one before it becomes a problem."
