Service-Oriented Architecture

However, nobody seemed to have any specific answer to these questions…

• Are we ready yet?
• If yes, then who do we ask for help – who is the most reliable?
• Who got the skills set to take an enterprise from today to CC world?

During the session I asked a speaker from Amazon, so how do you implement your Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud)? His straight forward answer in front of everybody was –"It is a bad answer – but we don’t disclose our implementation details." I could not help noticing the expression of annoyance on everybody’s face in that session. You have to take the word of his mouth that they are in the business for ages and maintain the records of more than 600 million credit cards (may be one of them is yours) - implies they are good at Cloud Computing which means they are good at security, scalability, stability, failover so on and so forth. I doubt if they are good at everything, may be some of you are convinced because they are Amazon.

My point here not about their capability, it’s about the Trust and Transparency and I think that is the biggest hurdle for Cloud Computing at this moment. So here is my problem as a technology service provider how do I guide my client where to go for Cloud Computing needs, if the underlying implementation details are abstract to me.

Gartner research indicates Security and Control are the most prominent issues and to resolve this we need to establish trust and openness. Having said that, I actually found some of the Cloud vendors have realised that point. After a session I had a conversation with a speaker from Salesforce, one of the biggest SAAS providers, and he entirely acknowledged the fundamental issue thwarting the progress of Cloud is trust. The action from their side is that they are taking security team from organisations like Citi, JP Morgan onboard for a visit at there Cloud hosting centre. I think Citi and JP Morgan are at least convinced a bit because they have hosted some of their non critical services in salseforce cloud.

Big players are more worried about security where as small players are sceptical about the whole concept of virtual shared environment which is the foundation of Cloud Computing. During one of the session while the speaker was discussing about Disaster Recovery, one of the CxOs was asking,’…if the infrastructure is shared with a big company, during a DR as a small company where do I stand? Will I be given same amount of attention?’ The argument here is that SLAs are there but at the time of DR billion pounds client may get priority over a million pounds client. Again it is a trust issue and the client is asking an SLA for SLAs :-)

One of the topic was being discussed widely was –‘The risk of vendor lock in’ Once you host your Services with a particular ‘Cloud’ provider and if you are not careful enough, there is always a chance of lock in. The danger is imminent and some of the organisations learnt lessons when locked-in with only one outsourcing service provider. How about hosting in multiple clouds with different vendors? It is possible only when the implementations are interoperable. If you look inside, some of the Cloud providers are having proprietary implementations behind those wonderfully smooth sailing Clouds. Definitely Linux is coming into the picture here together with IBM and they are making a point – when we are talking about multiple Cloud and inter-cloud communication, interoperability will be the most crucial point to address. I am sure there is a great opportunity for Linux and other open standard based communities to thrive.

I have no doubt we have done great progress in virtualisation in both software and hardware. But I still had to ask this question to one of the speakers "is our network infrastructure is ready yet?" One gentleman was shouting, ‘the bandwidth is not enough at Cornwell’, even it is not enough where I live in a place which is very close to London. Can the existing network provider handle the load of Public Cloud? Unfortunately no TELCO was there to take us through about its vision to support Cloud Computing. May be the developed countries are ready but what about the developing countries? There was discussion but no definite answer to my questions. I feel at this point of time Public Cloud may not be achievable from an end user perspective.

The feeling I got from the CloudExpo is that Cloud Computing is happening, the technology is available to support and everybody is looking forward to get some help and as technology service provider we have a big role to play. If we say Cloud Computing is the future then we got to take the responsibility to answer the following for early adopter (clients) and make the adoption far smoother.

• Are clouds right for you? I guess, we have to come up with a maturity model like the one we got for SOA/EA
• Which is good and bad cloud?
• Internal, external or hybrid?
• Have you achieved optimal consolidation ratio?
• What to virtualise and when?
  • Server
  • Desktop
  • Storage
  • I/O
  • Application
  • Service

   

  IDC expects Cloud adoption will be amplified by the current financial crisis. Small and medium size organisations that were either scared of SOA or did not like the complexity -‘SOA Reference Architectures with ‘n’ different layers from different vendors’, now can have the full flavour of SOA without having to do it by themselves. This Cloud is nothing but highly virtualised Services in the SOA world.

   

  Global financial crisis is changing business priorities and the IT that supports them, forcing IT to drastically reduce TCO and Opex. I think in this recession ‘Cloud Computing’ – this buzz word is going to draw a lot of attention and enterprise having right skill set & expertise would be able to position and getting into Cloud Computing should make would make good in road to the future business opportunities.