SOA, what happens when your service provider goes out of business?
As we move toward SOA based approaches, we face an interesting dilema. What happens when your service provider goes out of business (or when they kill a product line, or say, like MS tends to say after a few years “upgrade now or die“)? Unlike a software company whose components you have purchased going out of business, this could be potentially devastating to your application's infrastructure. How will you deal with this situation? Does your SLA cover you? Is this outside the scope of a SLA? I have a feeling this may become a hot topic as we move toward service oriented architectures. One major side-effect of this dilema may be the creation of serious barriers to entry for smaller software companies (which have a hard enough time with large licensing deals when they are shipping binaries).