Clouds + SOA = Ultimate Service Platform
Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by vbrown in Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture, Feature, SOA
Clouds and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Do they conflict as IT strategies? Are they flavors of the same approach – service orientation? Can you even adopt Cloud Computing without SOA? How do they relate and complement each other? There are almost as many variations in opinions as there are industry pundits! Some are very wise and insightful. Others totally off the wall!
Cloud and SOA are both game-changing evolutionary steps that offer unusually significant opportunities for exceptional ROI and business advantage. When taken together, they enable the ultimate service-based IT platform.
I’ve been an advocate of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm for almost 10 years. As a developer and architect I recognized the obvious value in SOA principles long before the approach was formalized as SOA and supported by the rich set of tools and technologies that make it almost pervasive, now. Prior to 2001, implementing loosely-coupled, contract-based, platform-agnostic, discoverable . . . component-based applications was very difficult, and very expensive. But when we could, and to the extent that our schedule and budgets would allow, many of us did our best to follow as many of those principles as we could.
SOA’s value proposition seemed obvious in those early days, and at a conceptual level was an easy sell to stakeholders and clients. When we tried to put together the actual roadmap and implementation plan, however, things got a lot murkier and looked a lot more risky! We were on new ground and had no “best practices” or “lessons learned” to guide us—or to help us make our case to those stakeholders.
In spite of our frustration as business technologists, corporate leadership generally took the right decision and avoided the risk, deferring adoption to wait for more maturity in the market. Now, our SOA practices have matured and the supporting technologies are mature and stable so, in most large enterprises, SOA is an accepted architectural approach.
But before we can even catch our breath, right on the heels of the SOA “movement” comes another disruptive paradigm change — Cloud Computing.
Note: I always caution my clients to qualify what Cloud model we’re talking about (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, etc.), but for the moment I’ll lump all Cloud models together. Although the issues are somewhat different when talking about SaaS Clouds (SalesForce) or PaaS Clouds (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) or IaaS Clouds (Terremark), for purposes of this discussion, the high-level strategies and the value propositions are very similar.
Cloud’s value proposition is that we can more effectively leverage our IT resources and assets. Hardware and network infrastructures can be pooled and shared (virtualized); IT facilities can be reduced because individual (stovepipe) facilities are eliminated; operations and support staff levels can be reduced and staff can be re-purposed to more forward-looking responsibilities.
Sounds compelling…. and pretty straightforward. Right?
Nothing this disruptive is ever straightforward! SOA wasn’t and nether is the transition to Cloud Computing.
Lots of material is becoming available that provides guidance for adopting Cloud Computing. Even more material is available describing best practices for SOA.
So, in my next series of posts, I’m going to focus on the synergies between the two. As I said earlier, adopting an IT ecosystem that deploys software “services” on a virtualized Cloud platform results in new levels of efficiency and service that are maintainable at lower cost and with significantly higher quality.
Stay tuned….
Recent Comments