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

CHAPTER 6
Working from Your
Services to the Clouds
Chapter 6
Doing nothing is very hard to do . . . you never
know when you’re finished.
—Leslie Nielsen
What is a service, and why do we care Services denote
behavior, or what is done by a service, such as
Update customer
Delete customer
Calculate insurance risk
Do a credit check
Services are not specific to cloud computing or to
SOA, for that matter. They are a way to describe how we
can access specific behaviors and data. Services are typically
exposed out of an application and provide a way to
access the value of the application, both behavior and
data, using a well-defined interface.
We can think of services as collections of functional
behaviors, each callable individually or as a group. You
can mix and match services to form composite applications,
or you can combine many services into a single
composite application. This approach provides flexibility
for the architecture, including the ability to leverage
cloud computing resources and the ability to change the
architecture as needed by the business.
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