SOA in the Clouds
Many are pondering what impact SOA will have on Cloud Computing. Because Clouds utility today is very low-level (e.g. pay-as-you-go computing cycles, storage, network) the inevitable evolution is the climb up the stack to application container services, then finally to application components. Interestingly enough, the highest level of the stack has already been achieved (at least initially). It’s called SaaS. In the current SaaS offerings available today, the Cloud utility concept is a user login (you buy one online, get it delivered on-demand and are billed as you go).
However, with the current SaaS paradigm you’re currently limited to the whole application. If your needs don’t happen to be fully met by the application offered, you’re a bit out of luck as far as the Cloud concept goes (that is, you’re left to conventional methods of customization, extensions, integration, etc).
Clearly, as the componentized utility concept (now appearing in the low-level offerings of Cloud Computing) matures, the software layer above it will at some point act in a similar fashion. This will have to involve the capabilities found in SOA.
No doubt about it, more and more organizations are moving to a service-oriented paradigm. The way businesses operate is becoming more agnostic to the location, format and overall makeup of the software and computing solutions supporting their operations. This is leading to a more services approach. Because SOA relies on components at its core, at some point these components will be consumable like Cloud services (such as computing cycles and storage) are today.
Other drivers may appear along the path up the stack, and perhaps some concepts are already here. Virtualization is definitely playing a role, but also Enterprise 2.0 and whatever the next buzz is, as long as it makes software act more like a utility, it’s a trend that is sustainable.
We’ll see enterprises cloudify their own environments as well as consume services right off the top of the stack of vendors providing SOA-as-a-Service components. Either way, for software vendors like SunGard we’ll be providing more flexible software capable of running inside the firewall as well as outside.
June 17th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Interesting! This touched off an idea for me. My team is just completing the models for about 42 common processes that are the ones that college and university academic/business units run and mapping them to the application portfolio in the SunGard Higher Education UDC (for any individual client we can then quickly map to their unique ap portfolio). These are “large” processes broken into flows that map to the way our customers in this space think about their work, like “Disbursing Financial Aid” or “Admitting Foreign Students”.
As technology moves up the stack, having processes clearly mapped like this give us a jump on bringing forward, relatively quickly the components that would power a customers solution, moving it to the Cloud would merely be swapping out the application portfolio components…oh…and then of course having access to the object in the Cloud. But we have the process models!
Great to have you here!