A conversation with Pablo Castro about Astoria's RESTful data services
In the latest episode of my Microsoft Conversations series I talked with Pablo Castro about Astoria, a layer of middleware that makes data readable and writeable by means of a RESTful interface.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jon Udell's May 2007 RESTful Web Services discussion framed REST as a design discipline for the web's next layer; weeks later, Microsoft's Pablo Castro is on Channel 9 describing Astoria as exactly that idea turned into shipping middleware — a layer that makes data readable and writeable through RESTful interfaces rather than bespoke service code.
First-order effects
- Developers working against Astoria-exposed data stores can read and write data over ordinary HTTP-style RESTful calls instead of hand-building a service layer per application.
- For Microsoft, Astoria puts the company's data-platform story behind REST as an interface convention, not just as a protocol discussed by web architects.
Second-order effects
- If Microsoft ships general-purpose RESTful data access inside its middleware, rival database and platform vendors face pressure to offer equivalent HTTP-native endpoints or cede the integration layer.
- Client-side tooling has an incentive to converge on generic REST data access patterns rather than per-database drivers, changing what third-party framework authors build against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the interface between applications and databases starts to commoditize around uniform RESTful conventions, shifting competitive value away from proprietary access protocols toward the data itself and the services layered above it.
The trend: Enterprise data access is moving from bespoke, vendor-specific APIs toward uniform RESTful interfaces exposed directly by the data platform.