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

136 Chapter 7 Working from Your Processes to the Clouds
Candidate services for the General Ledger system are
Add_Customer
Del_Customer
Update_Customer
Add_Account
Update_Account
Add_Product
Del_Product
Update_Product
Record_Sales
Update_Sales
Now we want to abstract or create processes from these services. Assuming
that the processes will not span outside of the existing General Ledger system,
a single process for generating a customer record might look like this:
1. Generate_Customer_Record
1.1. Add_Customer
1.2. Add_Account
1.3. Record_Sales
So, we would move from Add_Customer to Add_Account, and then finally
to Record_Sales, invoking each service in sequence, perhaps having
control logic and exception handling as part of the process. While this is a
very simple procedure, the core concept of BPM exists here, including the
ability to sequence the use of services, stringing them together to form a process.
We provide other examples later in this chapter.
It is important that you keep these steps in mind as you read the rest of
the chapter. This approach not only defines the concept of processes within
the context of the cloud computing opportunity, but helping you to understand
the approach before we get into the technical nitty-gritty is a much
better way to learn.
SOA, Agility, and Processes
Processes are core to the value of SOA; the ability to place things that will
change over time into a configuration (or BPM) layer makes it easier to change