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

CHAPTER 7
Working from Your
Processes to the Clouds
A process cannot be understood by stopping it.
Understanding must move with the flow of the process,
must join it and flow with it.
Chapter 7
—Frank Herbert (1920–1986)
Okay, we are moving up the stack. We have an informationor
data-level understanding of our problem domain from
Chapter 5, “Working from Your Data to the Clouds,” and a
service-level understanding of our problem domain from
Chapter 6, “Working from Your Services to the Clouds.”
Now we need to look at completing the story by having a
process-level understanding—the purpose of this chapter.
This book teaches concepts that help you understand
what you are dealing with and how to create a basic architecture
that allows you to make decisions about which
information, services, and processes, if any, are good candidates
for relocating to the clouds. In this chapter, we
spend a lot of time talking about the concept of processes
and the notion of business process management. These
are not necessarily new concepts; we are just looking at
them under a new architectural light: SOA and SOA using
cloud computing.
This chapter is designed in reverse, making sure to
introduce the continuation of our methodology and the
basic concepts up front, and then getting into the technical
details around business process management at the
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