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

126 Chapter 6 Working from Your Services to the Clouds
The Need for a Service-Level Understanding
While we covered a lot in this chapter, the core concept you want to take
away is that we need to understand the core services that exist in our problem
domain in order to make the right calls around which services should reside
on-premise and should exist within a cloud computing platform.
Through this exercise, we have a much better understanding of the interworkings
of our applications: what they do, the information they process,
which are good candidates for cloud computing, and which are not. Those
who choose to skip this process will find that services exist on the wrong platform,
either cloud or on-premise, and the new cloud computing architecture
is likely to fail.
While this seems like a lot of work, it really is only a quick survey and
understanding of the present services. While we recommend basic concepts
and basic approaches, the needs of your IT environment are going to be
unique and may require slightly different approaches. As long as the objective
of having a complete understanding of the services within the problem
domain are achieved, the way you go about doing that project is up to you.
Another benefit of understanding the domain at a services level is that
you can easily leverage the work defined in this chapter in other directions,
perhaps to support the core enterprise architecture or build and/or refine
your SOA. As we described at the beginning of this chapter, many of the
techniques and concepts are taken directly from SOA, with the caveat that we
are looking at SOA as it leverages cloud computing.
The fact of the matter is that most of those looking to leverage cloud
computing will skip the approaches defined in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. They will
typically start relocating or creating core business processes on cloud computing
platforms without a clear understanding of what they are relocating or
building. Chances are high that they will fail more often than succeed. With a
little bit of architectural planning and some basic work, you can remove a
bunch of risk from your cloud computing project. After all, we are looking to
reduce risk and cost—otherwise there is no need to consider cloud computing.
A little work goes a long way here and could make the difference between
a successful cloud computing effort and some of the disasters we are bound to
hear about as we move further along with this technology.