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

Old or New 83
The advantage of creating new systems in clouds is that you have a green
field opportunity because you can define everything and you are not limited
by an existing system that has predefined processes and data. The process of
defining a new system should be much easier and much more fun. New startups
today that leverage cloud computing have the ability to both design the
systems for cloud computing platforms and leverage cloud computing out of
the gate, which provides them with a key strategic advantage. You may assume
that many startups that break out over the next few years will do so
largely because their core IT operations costs are very low due to cloud computing.
They will have more agility with those architectures as well.
Let’s Get Some Context
This and the next two chapters—focused on understanding your data, services,
and processes—are really about defining what you already have so that
you have a complete understanding of what to place on a cloud computing
platform within the context of a larger architecture. Those who just toss applications
out onto clouds without this type of deep analysis will find that the end
of the process is more difficult and time-consuming than if they had worked
from a well-laid plan. This is true not just for a cloud computing architecture,
but for any architecture, including those that use SOA approaches, which is really
the purpose of this book: cloud computing and SOA convergence, or SOA
using cloud computing.
Understanding the data, the topic of this chapter, requires defining all relevant
metadata within the candidate applications, new or old, that you wish to
place on cloud computing platforms. This means defining where the data is
now, the data structure, the logical model, the physical model, security issues,
data definitions, and so on. At the end of this process, you should have a populated
metadata layer and a common information model (described later).
Understanding the services, the topic of Chapter 6, “Working from Your
Services to the Clouds,” means that we are looking at Web services, transactions,
or APIs that are externalized by the existing candidate systems. The purpose
of this process is to list them, understand them in detail, document them,
and link them back to the information model we defined in the previous step.
Again, we are attempting to understand existing or new services that either will
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