Cloud computing and SOA: more to each other

Cloud computing from the global financial crisis has been a greater space for development. Like "adding cloud computing can reduce costs, accelerate enterprise IT implementation, and expand rapidly." "Such popular slogans are almost everywhere, at least when manufacturers sell their cloud products," he added.

But the co-founder and chief technology officer Ross Mason of the open source SOA provider, Mulesource, said the description was not very appropriate for cloud computing, saying: "Just as SOA was hyped by vendors, it became a marketing term, not an exact description of the architecture." 2009 of Cloud computing again this scene, is completely heavy speculation, light and practical. ”

The professionals who are particularly sensitive to technical terminology may wonder, "is there any connection between cloud computing and SOA?" Why should these two nouns be put together? ”

Yes, cloud computing is inextricably linked to SOA, and some people call cloud computing the "rebel" of SOA.

As a business model for on-demand delivery services, cloud computing provides an enterprise with a quick way to deploy and apply it technology. But it also brings a big problem for IT staff. They have been working on SOA governance for a long time and have just made a few achievements over the years in implementing lifecycle management for the Web services environment, and are now changing these strategies to cope with the growing number of cloud-based services deployed. Because cloud-based services are probably not within their control.

Theoretically, "cloud" has almost the ability to deliver all the services, from the application software to the middleware, to the application platform, from storage, to process processing to hardware resources, can be delivered on demand in the form of subscriptions. However, in the cloud computing world, how can IT staff manage effectively?

The cloud raises concerns about it governance because the cloud allows us to extend the boundaries of trust from within the enterprise to the outside. In other words, the cloud complicates SOA governance.

A new question is how to integrate cloud services with the internal application of the enterprise. If there is no effective governance, anyone, anytime, if he wants to deploy a new cloud service, he can invoke the service, or integrate the service into an increasingly complex messaging system. In addition, the cloud services that are casually deployed can also disrupt established trust relationships, which are the foundation of a productive SOA environment.

The fundamental principle of SOA is that the distributed application environment must be platform independent, and that the SOA governance infrastructure should follow this principle. For example, in a pure SOA environment, an external API should be independent of the platform in which it is implemented. However, the first companies to experience cloud computing often ignore this principle, they build their applications on some public cloud services, and many services are based on proprietary APIs, proprietary development tools, special virtual layers and special governance strategies Although it is cloudy the service has made some changes to meet the open SOA and Web2.0 standards, but it does not seem to be thorough enough.

In fact, the best way to deploy cloud services is to selectively outsource specific applications and infrastructure services rather than blindly follow suit. Therefore, in the area of cloud computing and SOA governance, companies should first understand which services they can provide from the cloud.

As for the relationship between cloud computing and SOA, more people are willing to believe that they have a tacit understanding of each other.

For the moment, cloud computing technology has almost no concept of governance, anti-SOA, its governance technology has been quite mature, cloud computing can be a good reference to the experience of SOA, in addition, you can use SOA ideas to deploy the cloud computing architecture, because users need to extend their applications outside the firewall, So a modular architecture is important when the enterprise is deploying cloud computing services.

Of course, SOA can also benefit from cloud computing. In the future, providing SOA services on the cloud will emerge. It is welcomed by small and medium-sized enterprises that are in need of SOA because of their ability to save human costs, knowledge costs, and facilities costs. This model is already being tried by foreign manufacturers, and at home, SOA vendors like Primeton software are exploring this model