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Cloud Computing and SOA: Converging Technologies
The Cloud and SOA. Two technologies and two hot buzz words. Now increasingly, analysts and architects are beginning to see the synergies that are possible by pairing the two. The Cloud brings efficiencies of cost and scalability while SOA provides the architectural glue that can bridge and integrate data across applications and services.
David Linthicum summarizes the synergies of the fit between SOA and the Cloud by saying that “SOA has the ability to abstract cloud services into processes and composites, and then turn those processes and composites into business solutions.”
Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s WebSphere business, is quoted by InfoWorld, saying that “SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition. Can we build a datacenter infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that’s the cloud. It’s a service-oriented infrastructure. It’s taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure.”
Galen Schreck, vice-president and principal analyst with Forrester, thinks that SOA will reduce the cost of applications that run in the cloud. “Modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications, on the other hand, can readily scale up and down,” said Schreck.
Steven Worrall, Vice President at IBM, outlines the advantages of pairing SOA with a Cloud infrastructure:
Incremental Build Out. Cloud scalability allows organizations start small and grow SOA in small steps. The Cloud lets organizations easily roll out the SOA infrastructure as services become available. Gartner analyst Paolo Malinverno echoes Worrall’s recommendation, agreeing with a step-by-step approach to SOA deployment, saying “Leaping into such a computing environment too fast is treacherous. Gradual adoption is imperative for most enterprises.”
Deeper Group Alignment. SOA projects bring together groups to cooperate on the collection of data and with the sharing and packaging of data services. The flexibility of SOA allow IT to develop and deploy services that are closer to the needs of the different organizational groups.
Secure and Open. The cloud’s reach is broad and allows easy dissemination of data and services to internal groups, partner and vendors. While there is likely to be debate on this item, Worrall argues that Cloud standards like PCI, SAS 70, data encryption and identity management provide a solid basis of security for the cloud.
