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

222 Chapter 12 Moving Onward
code level. Conceptual standards that are nothing but white papers are
worthless.
Standards should be in wide use. This means that many projects leverage
this standard and the technology that uses the standard, and they are
successful with both. In many instances, standards are still concepts and
not yet leveraged by technology consumers.
Standards should be driven by the end users, not by the vendors. At least,
that’s the way it should be in a perfect world. While the vendors may
have had a hand in creating the standards, the consumers of the technology
should be the ones driving the definition and direction. Standards
that are defined and maintained by vendors often fail to capture the
hearts and minds, while standards maintained by technology consumers
typically provide more value for the end user and thus live a longer life.
The key advice here is to not let standards drive your architecture. Leverage
them where they are needed to support the architecture. The architecture
should be fairly stable, while the technology and the enabling standards will
surely change over time.
Q: How will SOA and cloud computing exist together in the future
A: Let’s get back to the basics. SOA is an architectural pattern that actually
predates the SOA buzzword. It is about breaking architecture down to a
functional primitive, understanding the information and behaviors, and
building it up again using service interfaces that are abstracted into a configuration
layer to create and, more importantly, re-create business solutions.
SOA, as the A implies, is architecture.
Cloud computing is a platform option, or a way of creating a system in
which some or all of its IT resources exist within some third-party cloud
computing resource, such as Amazon EC2 (an infrastructure-as-a-service) or
Force.com (a platform-as-a-service). Cloud computing is something that
can involve part or all of an architecture.
Cloud computing is an architectural option, but it is not architecture
unto itself. This will not change as we move forward. SOA should become
even more important to this emerging space because it provides guidance as
to how the architectures are formed and which target platforms are the correct
fit, on-premise and cloud computing–based.