ESB sprawl

I attended a presentation on IBM's Data Power product. One of the three speakers gave a brief on GCSS-AF, which the speaker credited for being the largest IT structure within DoD with one million users and 120+ different locations, and how it is using DataPower. I was introduced to some new heuristics and reminded that XML was introduced in 1995 and web services were introduced two years later. Years later we are still trying to figure it all out. A new phrase I heard that resonated with me was ESB Sprawl. ESBs are the latest rage -- well, not really, these have been out for quite a while and are still misunderstood. Anyway, like anything, these components can proliferate madly unless one has a good handle on their IT environment; hence, the phrase.

Metcalfe's Law -- the value of a network increases as the number of nodes on it increase (specifically, the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²)

Reed's Law -- the utility of large networks (particularly social networks) can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

Conway's Law -- Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it (for example, if you have four groups working on a compiler, you are likely to get a 4-pass compiler). Another way of stating this is the components and interfaces of system tend to mirror the engineering groups and their interfaces.