"Is cloud SOA done right?"
That's the question Phil Wainewright -- who has been tracking developments in this space since launching LooselyCoupled.com almost a decade ago -- put out to panelists at ebizQ's Cloud QCamp held earlier this summer. And, the consensus seems to be that cloud is helping to boost the advantages promised by service orientation to a firmer business footing.
Phil, well-known industry guru and ebizQ's Connected Web manager, who was joined by David Bressler, principal architect with Progress Software, Ed Horst, vice president of product strategy for AmberPoint, and myself in a lively panel discussion themed "Challenges and Opportunities in SOA and Cloud: Lessons Learned." (Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here, read the full transcript here.)
The panel kicked off with a discussion of the advantages cloud brings to the table, including service functionality across firewalls, more rapid delivery of information technology, and greater opportunities for integration. However, Phil pondered whether these are all the benefits that SOA was supposed to deliver.
Dave observed that cloud enables these advantages " through a way that allows you to use external providers to jumpstart that. "By doing that, it becomes much more component driven." Plus, actual costs of business and IT services are more visible. Often, he added, a lot of infrastructure inside the enterprise "is discounted because there's no clear or immediate benefit."
Both SOA and cloud "have the same benefits because they both are essentially -- fundamentally, architecturally, the same thing," Dave continued. "But that's where SOA leaves it -- as an architecture. Cloud is about external providers providing services and wrapping those things -- including the contract, the SLA -- and then delivering that to different constituents."
I pointed out that the ramp-up to SOA provided some foundation for the cloud experience, since "one of the big issues that many companies had to come to terms with in SOA is the establishing service level agreements, because they necessarily didn't know where the service was originating -- from another part of the enterprise, or crossing the firewall." reliability and scalability also needed to be guaranteed.
Ed noted, however, that whether its SOA or cloud, enterprise service consumers do typically have a handle on who is providing the service. "In a lot of the customer examples that we have -- telco, healthcare, those kinds of things -- they're still interacting with a well-known group of users," he pointed out. "It's not random, you-don't-know-who-you're-interacting-with kind of situation."
I also added that if one was to be attending a conference ten years from now, "you will see that cloud did change the way we look at SOA and for a couple of reasons." First, through cloud computing, the business gained a better understanding of service orientation. "If you want to sell SOA to the business, pitch it as cloud."
Dave also raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud -- for better or worse -- provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
He illustrated the point this way:
SPECIAL NOTE: We will be exploring many of the business issues shaping the new era of SOA in ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action virtual conference, to be held October 28-29.
That's the question Phil Wainewright -- who has been tracking developments in this space since launching LooselyCoupled.com almost a decade ago -- put out to panelists at ebizQ's Cloud QCamp held earlier this summer. And, the consensus seems to be that cloud is helping to boost the advantages promised by service orientation to a firmer business footing.
Phil, well-known industry guru and ebizQ's Connected Web manager, who was joined by David Bressler, principal architect with Progress Software, Ed Horst, vice president of product strategy for AmberPoint, and myself in a lively panel discussion themed "Challenges and Opportunities in SOA and Cloud: Lessons Learned." (Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here, read the full transcript here.)
The panel kicked off with a discussion of the advantages cloud brings to the table, including service functionality across firewalls, more rapid delivery of information technology, and greater opportunities for integration. However, Phil pondered whether these are all the benefits that SOA was supposed to deliver.
Dave observed that cloud enables these advantages " through a way that allows you to use external providers to jumpstart that. "By doing that, it becomes much more component driven." Plus, actual costs of business and IT services are more visible. Often, he added, a lot of infrastructure inside the enterprise "is discounted because there's no clear or immediate benefit."
Both SOA and cloud "have the same benefits because they both are essentially -- fundamentally, architecturally, the same thing," Dave continued. "But that's where SOA leaves it -- as an architecture. Cloud is about external providers providing services and wrapping those things -- including the contract, the SLA -- and then delivering that to different constituents."
I pointed out that the ramp-up to SOA provided some foundation for the cloud experience, since "one of the big issues that many companies had to come to terms with in SOA is the establishing service level agreements, because they necessarily didn't know where the service was originating -- from another part of the enterprise, or crossing the firewall." reliability and scalability also needed to be guaranteed.
Ed noted, however, that whether its SOA or cloud, enterprise service consumers do typically have a handle on who is providing the service. "In a lot of the customer examples that we have -- telco, healthcare, those kinds of things -- they're still interacting with a well-known group of users," he pointed out. "It's not random, you-don't-know-who-you're-interacting-with kind of situation."
I also added that if one was to be attending a conference ten years from now, "you will see that cloud did change the way we look at SOA and for a couple of reasons." First, through cloud computing, the business gained a better understanding of service orientation. "If you want to sell SOA to the business, pitch it as cloud."
Dave also raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud -- for better or worse -- provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
He illustrated the point this way:
"You and I are working in the same company. You have a service, I'm using that, we shake hands. 'Phil, throw an extra server in there because I'm going to add some capacity. How much capacity? I don't know yet. Okay, let's go play golf.' But now, I'm paying you to do the same thing as a cloud provider and I'm going to look at the bill. 'Ooh, how come there are two servers on the bill?' You might then go to your team say, 'find another service somewhere and put it in.'"The cloud providers will provide their services at a specific cost, that's the actual cost plus whatever the margin may be. Whereas, internal IT has always been kind of subsidized. If you need a project, you get internal IT to put it together for you, and delivered for you, and a lot of those costs either were hidden, and were dispersed across the enterprise. Cloud is forcing organizations to look at the actual cost of service delivery and perhaps the alignment more with what the market will be.
SPECIAL NOTE: We will be exploring many of the business issues shaping the new era of SOA in ebizQ's upcoming SOA in Action virtual conference, to be held October 28-29.
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