This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Sam Gentile. Original Post: Is The Middle Tier Endangered? Feed Title: Sam Gentile's Blog Feed URL: http://samgentile.com/blog/Rss.aspx Feed Description: .NET and Software Development from an experienced perspective - .NET/CLR, Rotor, Interop, MC+/C++, COM+, ES, Mac OS X, Extreme Programming and More! Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Sam Gentile Latest Posts From Sam Gentile's Blog

Harry Pierson has an excellent piece Is the Middle Tier Endangered? where he suggests that with Moore's Law (vastly faster and more powerful computers), service-oriented systems, and much better management we're headed towards elininating the middle tier. Ingo has an excellent response in which he suggests that IIS as it is today does not cut it as a “container” to manage the physical distribution of services without coding changes. He also says “For the second question, I think that, yes, most services which are used as backends for business applications don't have massive scalability requirements. But, you know, I still recommend most of my customers to run their services on a two-node W2K3 NLB cluster instead of on a single box. It's not that expensive. And it's not just about scalability. It's also about transparent failover and the ability to apply service packs and security hotfixes to single nodes in your cluster without taking down the whole application.” I am inclined to agree with both of his points especially the second. Failover is a powerful and neccessary capability for most services. I need to think about these excellent pieces some more and I encourage you to read them and think about them too.