There has been much debate recently over the fate of
"service-oriented architecture"
(SOA).
In January, Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes declared the
term effectively dead, a victim of the hype muddying its meaning
and the budget cuts affecting large IT projects.
The discussion continued at the SD West conference in Silicon
Valley earlier this month, where a series of panellists tore strips
off SOA.
David Platt, author of
"
Why software sucks and what you can do about it" said, "Like
any other buzzword it got thrown at everything to see where it
would stick."
But, although a majority feel the term has been devalued, even
its harshest detractors believe the fundamental concept it embodies
- a set of loosely coupled, interoperable business services which
talk to one another using open web protocols - is very much
alive.
Such an approach allows organisations to build and deploy new
applications and services quickly, using whatever mix of in-house
and external services best serves their needs.
As Thomas Manes wrote, "SOA is survived by its offspring:
mashups, business process management (BPM),
software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing and all other
architectural approaches that depend on services."
Dennis Quan, director of autonomic computing development at IBM,
drives much of the company's cloud computing agenda. He thinks SOA
will be critical to the emerging cloud IT landscape.
"SOA is still very much in play. Cloud computing is about
delivering highly scaleable services across the network and right
at the heart of that is the notion of services.
"In the beginning, a lot of the focus was on software as a
service, but today we are seeing it applied more broadly, with the
emergence of things like processing power, platforms, storage and
applications as a service - delivered from large, scaleable (and
often multi-tenanted) datacentres. SOA provides the framework both
for managing the cloud centre and tying together services into the
composite applications customers end up using," he says.
Analysts such as Gartner have been talking up cloud computing
since the crunch, lauding its potential for cutting costs. It is
true many firms are looking at consolidating server farms by
virtualising their infrastructure - but how many have made a
strategic commitment to deploying a service-based architecture on
that virtualised infrastructure, or plan to use externally-hosted
cloud services?
Nick Kirkland, chief executive of IT leaders' forum CIO Connect,
says, "It is a very, very small proportion. The service providers
who support this stuff have a very gung-ho, can-do attitude. But
the message we are getting back from our members - some of the most
senior CIOs in the country - is that they are listening, but they
are not convinced yet.
"There tends to be a range of thoughts from the high-level 'this
could change our cost model' to the low-level 'Google Mail went
down last week - how could I run a business on that sort of
thing?'.
"Fundamentally, people are still asking what this actually
means. Indeed, we are running a briefing on this shortly to try to
clear up some of the confusion."
But he stresses interest is rising, and more CIOs are "dipping a
toe in the water".
"An increasing number are trying out cloud computing in a
careful way for projects that do not involve sensitive data,"
Kirkland says.
But corporate CIOs need to balance the much-touted
cost-efficiency benefits against issues such as information
security, project management, availability, governance and data
portability. Since cloud standards for all these issues are still
evolving, CIOs of large organisations are unlikely to buy wholesale
into the concept of cloud-based SOA just yet.
Psychometric testing provider SHL has been using the cloud for a
year for development and trialling purposes. Chief information
technology officer Andy Ross says, "We are very pleased with the
results: it was quick and very cost effective to set up with the
provider we used.
"We do have to put more daily-type support in than we would
like, and for that reason we see it as a development or
quasi-production tool rather than a full-blown production
environment - but I can see that coming.
"We are a Microsoft shop and fully virtualised using Capgemini's
utility infrastructure so we are already part-way to achieving the
full flexibility of the cloud. My advice would be for rapid
trialling and development, you should try the cloud. For
production, we want to see a bit more maturity."
But IBM's Quan says it is vital to separate the idea of public
cloud computing (where an external provider offers hosted,
cloud-based services to clients, such as Amazon's EC3 and S3
cloud-based processing and storage services, or Google's Apps
suite) from internal or private clouds.
The latter, Quan says, can be employed as the basis of an
organisation's SOA without putting data or processes at any more
risk than normal. "There has been a lot of attention placed on
public cloud centres, but we believe the private cloud - whether
managed in-house or by a trusted provider - is central to the
hybrid cloud computing strategy we think will become dominant in
the next two years.
"With the right architecture in place, cloud-based datacentres
offer organisations lower management costs, the ability to bring
services online very quickly, and elasticity of resources. At the
same time, they are able to gain these economic benefits while
still retaining fine-grain control over their data security and
governance models," he says.
Guy Bunker, chief scientist at Symantec and a member of
cross-sector security task force the Jericho Forum, agrees private
clouds mitigate many of the risks for large organisations. But he
also believes companies need not eschew public cloud services
completely, since these will likely form a major part of corporate
IT once standards have settled down.
"Some of the companies using the cloud in earnest - such as big
pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca - are doing
exactly that. They are using Amazon's EC2 for certain services, but
not for those handling any sensitive data.
"Large organisations should look at public cloud services, but
they need to be aware of the pitfalls so they can ask the right
questions of their providers.
"Then, depending on their appetite for risk, they can decide
whether a particular function, application or whatever is suitable
for the cloud given its current state of maturity," Bunker
says.
While private clouds offer significant benefits for
risk-cautious businesses, Richard Hall, founder of cloud computing
consultancy CloudOrigin and an experienced former corporate chief
technology officer himself, believes the sheer economies of scale
achieved by public cloud providers will inevitably mean they
dominate in future.
"Although there may be some benefits looking at internal clouds,
particularly as a sandbox to explore concepts, I suspect the real
commercial benefits (savings on infrastructure and, unfortunately,
headcount) will kick in only when an organisation moves to a major
public cloud platform," Hall says.
In 2009, the companies with most to gain from cloud computing
will be industrial-scale users of infrastructure looking for major
savings, or startups who never want to make heavy IT investments.
Such companies should be looking at the architectural choices for
cloud platforms with respect to software design and infrastructure
deployment.
Many will actively trial technology and approaches this year,
with a view to deployment into 2010 as the major platforms such as
Windows Azure mature into production," says Hall. "Then I think the
first few snowflakes we are seeing now will turn into a full-blown
avalanche," he says.
Case study: Isle of Man
On a budget he jokes is "less than John Prescott's expense
account",
Allan Patterson, director of the Isle of Man's government
information systems division, has delivered an internal
cloud-based SOA that could be a showcase in microcosm for what much
larger organisations will be doing in future.
"It is what I would call 'building a virtual house'," says
Patterson.
"The foundations are our twin active virtualised datacentres
running on a Windows platform and our IP network across the whole
government estate of 250-300 locations - GPs' surgeries, schools,
sub Post Offices, etc.
"On top of that is the equivalent of the pipework and wiring -
the common services - which mean we can build something once and
use it many times."
This has drastically reduced the IT organisation's costs, but
also brings wider benefits.
Patterson says, "We have seen a massive take-up of online
services such as web payments by the business community and
individuals - we now have about 5,500 users for online services,
which for the Isle of Man is huge.
"I strongly believe this is how we make government-to-business
more effective. We have even got people who no longer maintain tax
books because they trust us to do it - so there are efficiencies
for end-users as well."