In IBM’s November 2009 SOA Newsletter, Fill Bowen, Program Manager responsible for Smart SOA in IBM Software Group, discusses the relationship between SOA and Cloud Computing, and shares prerequisites for providing services in a cloud and consuming services in a cloud.
The newsletter emphasizes that SOA and Cloud Computing are complements. SOA is an architectural style, while Cloud Computing is a deployment model. These concepts can come together in the design of the cloud computing environment:
"’SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition,’ says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s WebSphere business. ‘Can we build a datacenter infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that’s the cloud, so it’s a service-oriented infrastructure,’ he adds. ‘It’s taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure.’" – InfoWorld, “The cloud-SOA connection”
In discussing the SOA-Cloud Computing relationship, Fill offers a helpful analogy using books and a library:
“An interesting analogy for cloud and SOA is to think of books in a library. The books represent the services that customers can access once the library acquires them, and the library building represents the cloud where people come to check out the books/services. Books are reusable, and several books might make up a series or topic. Someone writes the book once and it is reused many times.
Using our analogy of books in the library, there are two components to consider when thinking about services in a cloud environment. One is the providing of services (books) to the cloud (library). And the other is the consuming (checking out) of those services (books). Each has different requirements.”
Read the article to learn of the prerequisites for providing and consuming services in a cloud.
[Disclosure: IBM is not a direct client of my firm, Elemental Links, however IBM is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client.]
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