[andyhedges]

SOA never required an ESB, this was simply vendors trying to shoehorn in a saleable unit of software - which they succeeded at better in the 90s. Likewise I've seen people implement microservices with an ESB in the middle.

Long an short of it is the ESB is an anti-pattern, always has been and SOA and microservices are the same thing.

[flukus]

Without an ESB SOA services and microservices are just remote procedure calls. Unless there is a real need like a client-server architecture then remote procedure calls are just an extremely slow version of normal procedure calls.

[bionoid]

Not trying to be pedantic or anything, but it's also extremely insecure, extremely unreliable and extremely hard to implement correctly when compared to a normal procedure call.

It just seemed weird to me to leave that out.

[andyhedges]

SOA is more than just RPC it's about the decomposition of your organisation in to cohesive (from a functional(ity) perspective) units of software, to reduce the need to make the remote calls, but more importantly allow you to organise your engineers into small enough groups of people to be effective (7 give or take one person).

ESB simply add more complexity in the middle that needs yet another team to manage.

[tannhaeuser]

Let's get the dates straight:

Enterprise Service Bus was coined by Progress/Sonic Software for their middleware product around 2002

Service Oriented Architecture as a term to describe an enterprise architecture around web services was only used after SOAP became a thing in 1999

[andyhedges]

Yes, but the concept existed in 'process servers' 'EAI hubs' and various other names. EBS caught on as the defacto term later.