Consumption is NOT Free

I recently blogged on the topic of an SOA marketplace dynamic that I believe will take shape over the next many years. It reminded me that I never have articulated my case for the fact that consumption of services is not free, so it shouldn’t be free.

Here’s what I mean: If I create a service for my own internal use, the certification effort (the level of structural, behavioral, and performance policy) will not be nearly as high. Over time my maintenance of that service will be much lower. There will be much less risk in changing that service when I have a well known, finite set of consumers that are under my control as opposed to a broadly leveraged service that will have a widely distributed use among lots of folks that I’m not even aware of.

All of this contributes to an increased cost of producing a service that is robust over time and reusable. So for the producer, consuming the service is not free. Given that, the consumption itself should not be free. There must be a reckoning of some sort when a project team gets the benefit of an existing reusable service that is properly maintained and therefore increased in its own cost for doing so. That reckoning has to occur and if it doesn’t either one of two things occur:

• Either we penalize the production of robust services and, therefore, we don’t get as many--
  
• Or we produce reusable services that will die on the vine as it were.
  

The increased burden without an associated increase in the budget for that service to be reused will actually threaten that service’s long term quality and adherence to policy.

So in the end, consumption of existing services does have a net decreasing effect on the cost and time of producing a solution. We’ve got to love that – but we can’t ignore the fact that it doesn’t come without cost even if it is less, much less than building from scratch.

All this means consumption isn’t free.