HealthIT Interfacing in the Cloud

I've been thinking a lot lately about Interfacing in the Cloud, and Microservices strategies, and how that makes things different.  Consider interface engines today.

The classic interface engine is a piece of middleware that supports a number of capabilities:

1. Routing
2. Queuing
3. Transformation (message reformatting, tweaking messages)
4. Translation (codes, cross walks, et cetera)
5. Monitoring and Management
6. Transport (HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, SOAP, FTP/SFTP, REST, SMTP/IMAP/POP3)

It's a piece of enterprise middle-ware, and classically a monolithic application that allows you to build highly orchestrated pipelines to do the work.

In the micro-services world, each of these areas could be its own bounded context, with a few extra pieces thrown into the mix (e.g., the Message itself is probably a bounded context shared by many pieces).  Instead of building highly orchestrated message pipelines, we could instead be building choreographed services, even one-off services to support specific needs into operation pipelines that would be highly scalable and configurable in a cloud environment.

It's an interesting approach that I frankly haven't seen anyone take on well yet.  Mostly what I'm seeing is interfaces moving into the cloud first as a great big chunk ... running in a Windows VM somewhere to start off with.  Then some decomposition into parts, and finally, maybe a rational micro-services architecture.  Eventually, I think we'll get there, but I'm not so certain that the emerging victor in the Interface engine competition is going to be one of the current leaders.  It's possible, but sounds very much like one of the classic scenarios found in The Innovator's Dilemma.

I'm not entirely happy with the current situation.  I think cloud needs different thinking and a different way of doing things to handle interfaces. I really hope I don't have to build it myself.

   Keith