One of the most interesting aspects of being a consultant is that I get exposed to any number of different facets of system design in the course of an assignment. While I tend to focus more on application and integration work, I find it fascinating to deal with the concepts of services in the context of infrastructure.

In the past, I've been called upon to design Service-Oriented Infrastructures (SOI) - the hardware and platform software, along with customizations for the needs of the actual deployment environment - instead of creating an application architecture. SOI is really a different way of looking at the concept of services - from the viewpoint of the operational staff.