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

Defining Processes 133
companies, geographies, and other cloud platforms. Potentially dozens of services,
data, and processes can be bound together across many internal systems
within many companies and many cloud platforms using a single process that
may be hosted anywhere.
Defining Processes
How do services fit into the picture Returning to our services model from
Chapter 6 and adding processes, it is clear to see that processes connect services
together to solve business problems, and services and processes may reside
on-premise or on cloud-based platforms as needed to support the
architecture, as seen in Figure 7.5.
Processes are funny things in that they may be services themselves, and
services can leverage processes just as processes can leverage services. This is
not meant to confuse things, just to point out that both services and processes
are able to provide behavior. Processes, as we stated earlier, leverage a
configuration and not a programming approach to defining that behavior, so
it is much easier to redefine a process than it is to redefine a service.
On-Premise
Cloud Provider
Figure 7.5 The general idea. Processes leverage services for behavior and information,
and these processes and services can reside on on-premise and cloudbased
systems as needed to support the architecture.