SOA and Cloud

Following on from my post about our WSO2 Cloud announcements, I felt it was important to talk about how I see Cloud intersecting with SOA.

Before we talk about Cloud, I want to quickly review where SOA came from. Most of us who started our IT careers in the 80s and 90s will clearly remember the pre-web Enterprise environment. Of course, so will everyone else - because that legacy is still with us. The typical systems were monolithic, complex applications that were completely self-reliant. Any interfacing with other systems was done through batch dumps. Applications grew and grew and grew into monsters because the only option was to enlarge the application - inter-application connectivity was too complex and unreliable to envisage.

The web changed all that, didn't it? Well actually, no. Many web applications are actually inherently monolithic too. Of course there are plenty of web applications that do communicate well with other systems, but they are still in the minority.

How about Cloud systems? Unfortunately, as I look around at the harbingers of Cloud Computing, many of the applications I see are fundamentally built with very little concern for Enterprise Architecture. The focus has been on elasticity. Elasticity is a great feature, but for many applications it is overkill. However, connectivity, partitioning, separation of concerns, and loose coupling are all key to making applications live and grow. As I have blogged about before, the key to effective applications is to ensure that they are not static but can change and improve and re-focus as the business demands.

My strong belief is that Cloud based systems must be built on SOA and modern Enterprise Architecture principals if they are to be effective. In many ways the issue is this: today's cloud applications are often well-defined, clean, insular applications. That is because the typical messy, interconnected enterprise app simply cannot be built in the cloud today. The data isn't available and so companies looking to create cloud applications tend naturally to avoid those. But over time, as these cloud applications grow and more appear, the interconnectedness with each other and with internal data and applications will grow and we will end up with the twisted balls of spaghetti that we've spent the last 10 years unpicking in the Enterprise.

My advice? Don't do it! Start with a simple but clearly defined SOA/Enterprise Architecture for your Cloud applications and in three years time you can look smugly at your competitors as they struggle to do things you find easy.

Obituary

From the Southampton Press: Adam Fremantle.

WSO2 and Cloud

Today WSO2 is announcing our cloud initiatives. We are offering a set of capabilities - from being able to use and deploy our servers on a pure pay-as-you-use basis with Amazon EC2 to a new connector that integrates your cloud computing and partners with your internal services.

As of today, all of WSO2's products will be available in additional forms:

• Firstly as Amazon EC2 images ready to go. With a ready-built, hardened Linux core, these "paid AMIs" are fully supported on a completly pay as you go model. You simply pay for them through Amazon - starting at $1/hour - and get production support included.
• Secondly as VMWare images. Aimed at private clouds, these images are ready to deploy out-of-the-box.
• Of course all our software is still available for download - and as easy as ever to unpack and get running.
  

The Cloud Service Gateway is probably the coolest announcement of the day: a simple plug-in to any of our Carbon Server runtimes that seamlessly and securely bridges between internal services and Cloud services. I'll be blogging more about that soon.

We are also offering our first initiative in Software as a Service: Governance. WSO2's Governance Registry is the leading Open Source governance tool. Now you can have your own instance of it, running in the cloud, for free. With just a simple online setup, you can provision users, manage security and start to capture your SOA domain information in a structured way. You can access it via remote systems or through the simple web interface. While the service is in beta, it will be free-to-use. After that there will still be a basic free offering and if you wish to expand beyond that there will be straightforward pay-as-you-use pricing.

I have a lot more to talk about regarding Cloud and WSO2 - so stayed tuned for some interesting blogging!

Adam Fremantle (1934-2009)