asinglenet

If speed is your biggest concern, it is likely that you will build a system that has a lot of services which each have a shallow stack. Each service would not go very deep into the service stack before hitting the data it was looking for. PHP, for example, almost always works this way. Maybe the data would be in a cache, as suggested by other commenters here. You have more places to put caches if you think about your system as multiple services.

If you are making a big system, you probably would not want to try to put all of the components in one monolithic place. I argued that this makes testing and release more complicated (and slower). But, I suspect it also affects runtime speed by making the stack deeper. You would be doing more switching to get your requests to the right components.

Yes, MAXOS is a variant of SOA. And, service architectures seem to have won the test of time. However, the modern version of service architecture has a very different management philosophy from the SOA of the last decade. The old SOA was to put components in place with a top down design. The new version is designed to evolve with lightweight and bendable protocols, peer-to-peer interactions, and continuous integration.

The old version of SOA focused on defining the protocols and API's that services would use to communicate, from the top down. There was a lot of effort put into standardized object definitions and CORBA and EJB, and standardized protocols like SOAP. The resulting services were put into directories and locked down. That's what made SOA so annoying and cumbersome. It was a lot of work just to set up the plumbing, and then you can't change it to do what you want.

I call the new version "service architecture" because "service oriented architecture" has such stifling connotations. This version uses a variety of protocols which are faster, lighter, and sometimes more specialized. It can include the old RPC protocols, new platform-specific RPC, connection pools, message queues, HTTP-REST, and plain old HTTP. It's not so important to define the protocols up front, because the whole system is always being tested as a unit. Reliability is being created by continuous integration, not by up front engineering and standards. There is little effort to package things into similar code objects. Services from many different languages and platforms co-exist. That's the whole idea.

That said, I believe that services packaging may converge into something portable like Docker containers. As my friend Aaron O'Mullen of Codebox said, a Web service is the new executable.

I don't make a conjecture about the reason that agile events skew to an older crowd because I really, really don't know why it is true. I do know that it changes the whole perception of the effort. So, I have to be careful when I use the word "agile". It's got a demographic implication that isn't positive, isn't "us" for many younger people. You can argue about the wisdom of my saying it this way, but the word has a real demographic and emotional association. This article is a chance to express my doubts about the word "agile". It's done. I'll be more positive from here on out.

CMM and PMP are basically anti-agile. They are useful, but useful for projects that just shouldn't be agile. The fact that agile events attract a similar demographic isn't a positive, in my opinion.

It's not sarcasm. It's a chance for me to unload the real doubts I have had about using the word "agile". I'll be more positive from here on.

Author here - I can make an observation about old people because I myself am 49 years old. I'm not making a value judgement about older people. That would be ageism. I'm observing that the attendees "agile" events tend to be older than most programmers, and even most IT staff. That's just demographics. Why is that? That affects a lot of things.

No, Assembla is not proud of having such a low selling price. We have seen that as a problem since the beginning. The original sin is not the current low selling price. The original sin was offering the "private" product for free during a time when it wasn't a serious business for us. We took an enormous amount of abuse when we discontinued this product, and to soften the blow, we worked to keep prices low. We did this even though it's clear that a customer who makes a decision based on a $2 price point isn't going to make much of a contribution to the company. It's now clear that our gesture wasn't fully appreciated, and it's dragging down the pricepoint for our serious customers - startups, corporate product developers, outsourcers, agencies, and consulting companies that need professsional management features.

I have to disagree with the guy that says the service doesn't have value over $20. Even on the face of it, he would replace it with a server costing $50/month, plus install and admin time costing at least that. So, he's already at $100. He's probably only using the subversion repository, which he could easily install on his own. However, if you are serious about getting the most from your team, you would be using the alerts, code browser, the ticketing system, which would cost you substantially more if you bought it from Atlassian or Fogbugz, and be well worth it. If you have a consulting operation, as many Assembla customers do, you will use the time tracking and reporting. In other words, if you manage your team professionally, you will get a lot of value out of this software. And, certainly we will work on charging appropriately.