Cloud Computing - SOA Interlinkage: Is it enterprise Ready?
Provisioning of Cloud infrastructure via services, be it storage, or compute power, or utility services, or even business services, is a great idea. However the very notion of usage of XML based Web Services (or even REST based services), over the web, to deliver on this vision of Infrastructural SOA with leverage of multiple infra services from multiple providers to create an enterprise app, as close to enterprise ready as possible, is ridden with its own set of issues, primarily stemming from the NFRs (non functional requirements in SOA)..
1. In distributed application development leveraging these cloud infra services, how is security handled in a robust manner?
2. Like in traditional in house hosted apps, will such federated infra be able to provide the requisite reliability (and availability - think 99.999 % for enterprise ready).
3. issues related to Data management, XML management, distributed synchronization models, transacation models, etc. is a huge area of gap to really address enterprise readiness..
we can go on and on..
This is a clarion call to create a research vision for such federated futuristic vision of zero in-house intra enteprise infra, leveraging best of breed infra services from the cloud via standards based SOA..There is a need for SOA researchers and grid community and the data base community to address this...
Comments
Cloud computing has not resolved the issue of huge data transfer that a typical database oriented enterprise application requires. Until this issue, as well as the security issues are resolved, the Fortune 500 companies are not likely to sign-on to Cloud Computing in a big way. Niche applications could migrate to the cloud, an interesting area is cloud hosted desktop replacement applications such as Word Processors, Spreadsheets etc.
Posted by: Kevin Apte | June 8, 2008 07:19 PM
Kevin
You have rightly reinforced the need for data transfer issues and security issues as the biggest roadblocks in Cloud adoption by enterprises. Likewise your thoughts on word processors or even web based team collaboration portals like seework.com, which are already using cloud. However, for fortune 500 companies to realize the vision of an enterprise leveraging services from best of breed providers from the cloud, will need more pointed research, investigation, including turning back to our old research papers and patents in distributed databases, to look for answers.
Posted by: Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni | June 11, 2008 11:57 AM
Dr Srini
The basic stack of IT static content, applications, software, data, hardware and network needs to be cost effective, easy to maintain and should meet the SLAs. Under this simple guiding principle companies can find innovative ways to share content, apps, software, data or hardware. Sharing of content and apps is now very common. Sharing of data is difficult and sharing of infrastructure is still at the data center level. Sometimes cloud computing seems to be too theoretical to meet the business demands. Look what happened to Grid computing....
Posted by: Shreyas Kamat | June 12, 2008 09:47 PM
I am afraid, Cloud Computing in the hands of Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google and alike (I do not have anything against those companies) can appear as financially lucrative to the business as outsourcing to Asia did at the beginning. Companies screwed their IT and very few of them gained back lost domain knowledge. They, actually, outsourced heads and lost brains; they saved some money until it was time to go forward but w/o a head it was a tricky task...
With Cloud Computing, business can save on IT infrastructure and deploy its mission-critical applications in the ... Cloud; the same is about data. What else is needed to those bad guys who want to put us on our knees?
This is not a technical issue, it is the political and social problem. Cheaper does not always mean better. Some technologies should be restricted or tightly controlled to save people, us.
Posted by: Michael Poulin | September 26, 2008 10:53 PM