Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

Process-as-a-Service 49
SOAP/
HTTP
salesforce.com
SOAP/
HTTP
XML/HTTPS
Oracle
FTP
IMI (Direct Mail)
SOAP/
HTTP
SMTP/FTP
California
Lithographers
(Brochures, Printing)
SFTP
Business processes
between partners are easily
shared through the network
SOAP
Address Validation Service
(Third-Party Service)
peoplemetrics
(Surveys)
Figure 3.5 Process-as-a-service allows you to bind on-premise or cloud-delivered
resources together to form business solutions.
be to create a business process that defines how to process an invoice on remote
cloud-delivered systems and then have that process invoke any number
of cloud-based or on-premise services to form the business process. The
SOA gains the value of agility because processes are easier to change than
applications.
We cover processes in more detail in Chapter 7, “Working from Your
Processes to the Clouds.” For now, it is enough to understand that processes
are meta-applications that bind many services and information together to
form a business solution. Because they follow a configuration rather than a
programmatic approach, it is often easier to create and change processes using
a graphical interface than to write new programs.
Process-as-a-service provides a mechanism to bind other resources together
to form a solution. While your information and APIs may be hosted
within a cloud provider, or perhaps on-premise, you would leverage this service
to abstract and bind these resources together to form a business solution,
such as processing a sale or shipping a product.